Create a Time Budget.

The most egalitarian resource in the world is time; we are all allocated the same amount daily. We have 24 hours a day, 168 hours a week, 720 hours a month, and 8760 hours a year. Time is the most significant lever, you can make more money, but you cannot make more time. When we want to spend our money diligently, we create a spending budget, but we rarely do the same thing with our time. Most of us are not deliberate with how we spend our time; we mindlessly doom scroll social media, gossip about other people and events all day long, spend time with time wasters and entertain ourselves unconsciously without paying attention to the brevity of our time here.

The life expectancy in most developed nations is around 78-80 years, around 10,000. We sleep 1/3rd of our lives and work plus commute takes another 2/3rd. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates once said: “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.” We live in Someday Isle, postponing living until we figure it out, but the challenge is that no one has it figured out yet; everyone is winging it. How you spend your time truly reflects your values and priorities. It would help to re-evaluate your priorities, values and commitments to create an effective time budget.

Time Confetti

Time Confetti is a term coined by the author of Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Brigid Schulte. Time Confetti amounts to little bits of seconds and minutes lost to unproductive multitasking. Each bit alone seems not very bad. Collectively, though, all that confetti adds up to something more pernicious than you might expect. ¹

Jay Shetty prefers the following strategies for creating a time budget: ²

Step 1: Audit what you do in an entire week. Don’t change anything; make a record of your activities. The goal is to find patterns.
Step 2: Reflection – Go through the audit and categorize how you spend your time. Tally which categories are getting the most of your attention. The way you spend your time should reflect your values.
Step 3: Make Adjustments – Set healthy boundaries, limit social media use to a 30-minute window each day, carve out an hour to exercise and stick to it or no more candy crush ever again.
Use tools to enforce the adjustments, such as apps that limit screen time, alarms that remind us to exercise, and accountability partners.

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – A Gentle Container
When we are on hyperdrive, it is not always easy to feel how we are feeling. There are times when what we are feeling feels too heavy to hold what we are feeling. Our natural instinct is to turn away from our difficult emotions. By repressing emotions, we lose the opportunity to build the confidence that we can hold our pain.