No Time At All

I like to play with time and to ponder if it really exists.  After all, time seems to control and consume so much of our lives – second only to money.  I keep thinking if time doesn’t exist then there’s no need to be so stressed.

We started seriously looking at our personal time about a year ago.  We didn’t know where we were going to end up but I knew we had to go somewhere, anywhere else.  So out came the flipcharts and we began to write down everything we do – and I mean everything!  Nothing was too small or too large to be included.  Five or six very full sheets of paper later we stood back and understood why we felt so stressed.

Still not sure where we were headed, we decided to assign each item into a variety of groups: musts/wants/shoulds/chores/projects, daily/weekly/quarterly/yearly, high/medium/low priority, high/medium/low level of stress if not done and finally whether or not the item moved us away from pain or towards pleasure.  Several interesting patterns began to emerge.

The first pattern we spotted right away.  We were holding onto so many “I shoulds” we were shoulding all over ourselves.  In some cases we had been shoulding for over eight years with nothing to show for it!  We immediately went through every “I should do” and decided if and when it was going to be done or we let it go. What an enormous weight to have lifted so easily.  Now we do our best to be diligent and replace “I should” with “I will” or “I won’t”.

The second pattern was a mismatch relationship between priority and stress levels.  Many activities we ranked as high priority actually had assigned low stress levels if left undone.  Similarly, there were items with a low priority but caused high stress levels if left undone.  This really helped us to see what truly was important to us, not just what we assumed was important.

I was most stunned by the third eye opening pattern.  A good two-thirds of how we spent our time was motivated by moving away from pain.  This meant only one third of our time was moving us towards pleasure!  No wonder we were having a hard time achieving our dreams.  Hardly any time was spent working making them come true!

You should (oops!) see some of the looks I get when I suggest doing this exercise.  But step back a moment – how can I change my life if I don’t know what I’m dealing with?  The data is all there – I just have to look at it.