TIME
"I don't have time to do that." "Where does she find the time?" "When I have more time, I'll . . . "
We are all busy, we're all short of time. But we all have the same amount of time available in any given period. Other people don't have longer hours or days than we do. So what do we mean we don't have time to do something, that later we'll have more time, that someone else has more time than we do? When we think about time, we're really thinking about priorities, about planning, about making the best use of our time.
Wasting time is wasting a precious, irreplaceable resource. We can never recover time already spent. So how do we deal with time? First, we need to know what we want to accomplish in a given period. (And that period can be the next hour, day or week, or the rest of our lives.) Do we want to improve our bodies by exercise? Do we want to improve our minds by reading? Do we want to improve our feelings by listening to music or going to a party or pursuing some hobby? We can't sensibly say we want to do all these things at once. More importantly, we can't use our inability to decide, to prioritize, as an excuse to do nothing. Or do we ever do nothing? Maybe the answer is to accept that we do what we want to do, what we need to do, in any given period. For example, resting our bodies with sleep is not viewed as waste of time so why should resting our minds with passivity be a disgrace? Perhaps the answer is accepting that it's ok to be idle.
Prioritizing, scheduling, planning our time is making conscious tradeoffs. In order to do something, we must forego doing something else. We have to decide what is most important to us and do that. We have to decide what is best for us. Do we have to plan the rest of our lives in order to go to a party? No, but we have to think about the short-term and the long-term. We have to do the best thing for the moment without abandoning the rest of our lives. We have to select long-term goals and do things which promote those goals but not everything needs to be on the direct path to those long-term goals. To use a cliche, we can stop and smell the flowers. Little breaks from our grand plans are important: They refresh us for the long journey and they sometimes show us alternatives which replace the original grand plans, which start us on a new and better path.
Time is spent whether we plan it or not, whether we want to or not. Time cannot be saved and deposited in a bank. Use it as wisely as you can.
12-6-99
Archives 1999 Archives 2000 Archives