Image by Daniel Byram from Pixabay
I try to create my own agenda. I have a list of books to read, ideas to try, hobbies, to-do lists, family interests, wishes, financial matters, work life, etc… But not so long ago, I felt like I was getting lost while trying to plan these things. Looks like my way of planning took a lot of time and dedication. I wanted to be prepared so that all these attention seekers in my life, had a smooth run. I think the basic instinct was to create some quality time period during the day. At the end I felt like I am stuck, forced or restricted by my own planning. It felt robotic… I spare some time for my hobbies lets say, but then I do it in the time I allocated for it, not when I feel for it. How is this being a quality time then? Take it otherwise, if I handle things as I feel, then everything gets messy. I guess I needed a sweet spot.
One of my values in life is time. I would like to be aware of how I spend it. I think I was a bit obsessed with it. Most of the time I was just doing things just to tick it off from my list. So I didn’t really understand or realized what I was doing. Why? I think I perceived quality time as having more spare time that I could spend on my scheduled list. I felt like I was stuck in a closed loop where I felt satisfied if I was able to spend my time on my list items. As I ticked off, I had no trouble to add new ones. And it went on and on without any nutrient to me.
There is nothing wrong with giving value to time since it is limited for each and everyone of us. Let me share here with you a great course I took in 2020. The Science of Well-Being by Yale University. The course was taught by Professor Laurie Santos. If you search it in internet, you will find it. It was free back then, but not sure now. One of my gains from that course was the term “time affluence”. It was basically one of the parameters to potentially define how much happy you can be. If I can manage my time to spare some of it, then that would be great!
Planning is the key to manage time, I guess you would agree with that. No objection from me as well. Lists and calendars are nice tools to achieve planning. On the other hand, there is one small detail I think I was doing wrong all along, which in turn put me in that closed loop. I focused on ticking items off as much as I can, not being aware of new ones will appear soon. That urge is similar to combining items with an AND. “I will do this AND do that AND call him AND go to there AND pay that AND ……” until my day goes off. That is wrong. How about using OR. If I decide most important things for that day and do them, lets say 3,4 or 5 of them (but not 10) with an AND, then continue with OR. Well that is something I am trying now. And it seems working so far.
Lastly, coming back to time affluence, I think it is the time I saved from “AND” items, which in turn I invested for “OR” items.
All the best…
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