Be Sure to Spend it Wisely
The topic of spending time is nothing new. It’s a topic that is written about a lot. My search online for “spending time” uncovered 289 million results. Just so you know, I didn’t read them all. 😊
As I’ve been working on setting my goals for this year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what and where I should put my focused intensity. I struggle with this. What things should be in what order.
Earlier this week I heard a Business Made Simple Daily from Donald Miller entitled How to Know What is Worth Your Time. Notice it doesn’t say “what your time is worth”, but “what is worth your time”. Donald uses the example that his truck tags had been expired for several months, but he chose to spend his time on other things he determined to be a higher priority.
This conversation about time reminded me of how in his Hero on a Mission course for goal setting and life planning starts out with writing your obituary. This form of starting with the end in mind makes the point that for each and every one of us…life is over at some point. As we race through the routines of our daily lives, we just don’t think about time from a finite aspect.
We tend to approach life as if we have all the time we want. This isn’t the case!
So, if we accept that time is limited, what do we do? Determining “what is worth my time” is a good place to start.
This is the hard part for me…there are so many great things that I want to do.
One of the problems with time is that we we’ve been given it. You’ve done nothing to earn the time you have. It isn’t like money. You can’t go earn more time. You can’t put time in the bank and save it for later. Time is being spent constantly and we take it for granted!
Once time is gone you can never get it back. Don’t waste what little you have!
Each of us spend time differently. The important thing is to determine where it is that you are going to spend yours.
Back to goal setting and how time relates.
As I have been listing out all the things I want to accomplish this year, I realized many of them were on the list last year and the year before that…and the year before that. I see a pattern here.
Maybe I’m trying to do too much?
The more I worked through the list the more lost in the fog I got. How can I figure out what is worth my time?
I decided that if I was going to do this, I needed to take the limited time thing seriously. To do this I determined that a good place to start would be to figure out how much time the things on the list would take and compare that to the amount of time available to spend.
Those of you that know me, know how I’m going to this…a spreadsheet, of course.
I’m now going to go get to work on my time budgeting spreadsheet. I’ll let you know how that goes in a future post.
