Although we objectively have more time for leisure than we did in the 1950s, thanks in part to modern conveniences, we now feel more pressed for time than ever. While on the one hand technology has given us more time, it has also left us with objectively less leisure time. Every time we check an alert we’re being pulled out of the present and into other things we could or should be doing. It creates these feelings of goal conflict when we’re trying to engage in a meaningful conversation, but our mind is constantly running to other things that might be on our smartphones calling our attention. In addition to goal conflict, we are feeling time stress. It’s no surprise some parents enjoy spending time with their kids less as they derive less meaning and satisfaction from going to a park, distracted from the alerts on their phones. Suddenly instead of seeing the joy that the height of the swing brings their child, they’re thinking about all the other things they could or should be doing. The opportunity cost of their leisure somehow feels higher, certainly higher than the swing. This goal conflict and time stress undermine the amount of leisure we have. It chips away at our small, otherwise precious moments. Americans report feeling “time-poor”, like they have too many things to do and not enough time in the day to do them. These are feelings of time poverty contributing negatively to happiness and undermining our social relationships. Time poverty is associated with a greater risk for cardiovascular disease. We are less likely to eat healthily or exercise more, feeling overwhelmed by the demands of work and life.
The happiest people use their time deliberately and thoughtfully. They’ve moved from a feeling of time starvation to one of time affluence. Being mindful is key to becoming a “time athlete”. By that, I mean that you must be aware of how you’re spending time. This involves feeling how activities affect your mind heart and body, i.e. noticing what activities bring joy. Think about how much time you typically spend on activities that are meaningful and satisfying. Where possible, you want to maximize the amount of time you spend on those activities and minimize the amount of time you spend on unpleasant or stressful activities. Simply use the Marie Condo method on time and ask yourself, “Does it spark joy?” Pick it up, so to speak, look at the way you spent time and ask did the activity bring you meaning. Was it attached to some higher goal you have in life? If not, should you keep doing it, or maybe you should get rid of it? You can go through this activity and think about allocating the way that you spend your time to better match how you would like to spend your time. However, it’s not all about immediate pleasure or joy. Some things worth spending time on might be low in short-term pleasure but high in long-term meaning. Think of a two-by-two grid where you can have an activity that’s high in meaning but low on satisfaction, i.e. staying up all night with a newborn. This is high in meaning, but does might not feel good at the moment. As such, it’s not just simply about maximizing pleasure. You also must maximize meaning as well. A massage is a perfect opposing example, not very meaningful or purposeful but a very pleasant activity. You want to be thinking about time as diversifying your portfolio just as you would your financial investments. You want some activities that are high in meaning, like taking care of your sick kids, that are not necessarily super pleasant at the moment. You need some activities that are high in pleasure but not necessarily high in meaning, like a massage. And then, of course, you want activities that are both engaging and purposeful like work you are passionate about or volunteering or in engaging civic activities. We all know time matters, and now we can put more focus on time. By making small decisions around the margins, you can have more and better time. There are all sorts of strategies for making this move with radical approaches to managing your time. Some key steps include your awareness and ability to Study Time, Find Time, Bundle Time, and Reframe Time.
Study Time
How exactly do we study time? You want to think about a normal day where you would experience the typical strains of everyday life, not a weekend where your schedule may look different than it does usually. Use a typical workday like a Tuesday. Then think about the activities that you engage in in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening, writing down the major episodes. You want to write out whether the activity was meaningful, pleasant, not meaningful, or unpleasant. Did it make you feel stressed out? Next, think about all the activities that were not meaningful and not enjoyable; could you get rid of it? Either stop doing the activity or ask yourself whether you could pay someone else to do the activity, or delegate it to someone else if it’s a work task. Really the point of this exercise is to begin to cultivate awareness about our activities and to cultivate a greater awareness around how you spend time on an everyday basis to start spending moments, minutes, and time in everyday life on activities that bring you joy. We often think we need to have a lot of free time to spend more time in ways that bring us joy and satisfaction like helping others, exercising, or socializing. However, even spending 30 more minutes a day engaged in active leisure can have powerful benefits for our mood. The whole purpose of a time study is to see where your time goes missing on an everyday basis and then to think about how you might be able to infuse some of the time that you spent in otherwise unpleasant activities into a more positive and pleasant place. This doesn’t require clearing out seven more hours of your day to do the thing that’s the most meaningful or the most pleasurable. You can do this on the margins, and that’s the whole point of this exercise. To find places where you might spend half an hour possibly scrolling on social media and trying to substitute that time with an activity that you want to do more of, like exercise, going outdoors, or spending time with your kids. For me, I stopped spending my entire Sundays cleaning the house and doing laundry. I still use that day to prepare for the week ahead, but it involves sleeping in, enjoying meals, savoring coffee, spending quality time with people, and alone time by myself. What about the laundry you ask? Well, that got moved to any free ten-minute spot, as I’m passing by the washer or dryer between my activities. This time study and small change has been a paradigm shift in how my time spent feels. Laundry no longer feels onerous or time-consuming, and my Sundays feel more restful.
Find Time
One of the reasons why we all feel so time-poor is that we often waste time, or we let our technology take up more time than it should. Finding time is this idea of noticing where we get sucked into a trap, where we’re engaging in unpleasant and unproductive activities, but we’re maybe not conscious about how much time goes missing in those activities. For me, it’s my phone and mindless scrolling through the different apps. Our smartphones make it way too easy to move from LinkedIn to Instagram, to shopping on Amazon, to clearing not one but many of our inboxes when I should be working on something important or should be spending quality time engaging. Finding time is becoming mindful of when I do that and trying to substitute that time used for something else. I’m not saying we should smash our phones or live absent of technology, but to be more mindful and intentional about how we use technology. Maybe set times in your day to be on your phone taking care of your phone ‘needs’ so that the time spent throughout the day is more meaningful and intentional. When I’m in the middle of something, I no longer check or respond to text messages. I try to stay focused and engaged at the event at hand and handle text messages the way I do laundry, in passing. Learning to use the ‘Do Not Disturb’ on your phone is helpful to keep the notifications at bay and the urges that come. Finding time, finding those pockets in the day that go missing, and trying to be intentional in how we use the time that otherwise tends to go missing is key to having more time. We’re basically finding time around the margins. In doing so, you’re essentially minimizing the amount of time that you spend in mindless, unpleasant, and stressful activities like doom scrolling on social media or other ways that we waste time on an everyday basis. Constantly checking our e-mail can get in the way of more purposeful and pleasant activities. Even household chores might fit into this bucket. For some of us, household chores fall into the lower left-hand quadrant of non-meaningful, unpleasant activities and where possible you can use money to outsource some of these activities. Where it’s possible, get rid of some of the activities that make you stressed, that are not bringing you joy, that do not have a higher meaning in life both at work and in your personal life to find time.
Bundle Time
You can find more time by connecting an activity you like with something you don’t like, which I call bundling time. Bundling time is another way of feeling more time rich as well as bringing more meaning to mundane activities we must spend time on. Imbuing some of the negative moments in your day with something more positive. For example, when we are commuting, you could engage in music therapy and listen to your customized playlist you otherwise don’t have time to get to. Or try listening to that podcast or audiobook you’ve been meaning to get to while doing household chores. I personally enjoy catching up on my shows while I’m on the treadmill and elliptical. I also spend a portion of my swim time thinking through any of my work issues or decoding other challenges. This not only helps me save time, but I almost always come up with the best next steps and solutions while feeling at ease swimming laps. Bundling time is also a great way to get you to do things that you otherwise may not want to. My husband hates exercising, and for all the years I’ve known him, he’s not been able to get into a good habit. So we agreed that the only time he gets to watch The Walking Dead is while he is on the treadmill. So far, he’s on season 3 and I’m hoping that by the time he finishes the series, he would have established a good habit of exercising regularly. Admittedly, he’s not there yet but I’m optimistic and happy to report that there are still 11 seasons.
Reframe Time
Obviously, we can’t always outsource tasks we don’t like or maybe we don’t want to. Some people are never going to hire a house cleaner either because of financial reasons or because they have kids and want their kids to see that their parents care about doing the chores. They want to instill values in their kids and even get them involved with the chores, so they’ll never outsource, and that’s totally fine. However, a lot of what time poverty is created by is this feeling of goal conflict. Again, having too many things to do and not enough time to do them, feeling pulled by many directions in our life. One thing we can do to mitigate against some of this goal conflict is to reframe some of the negative activities that we have to do that we can’t outsource, that we don’t love, and that feel a little bit stressful but might be helpful for our broader goals in life. One reframing strategy we can take at work relating to finances is this idea of thinking about how our drudgery in the workplace can help our colleagues get their work done. Simply seeing the connection between our tasks and other people’s tasks is one way you can reframe negative experiences at work. It’s something more positive. Another way you can put this strategy into practice in your own life around reframing time can help you get greater joy out of your weekends. Reframing our weekends like a vacation, simply telling ourselves that the weekend’s upcoming leisure is special or different, and trying to treat it like a vacation can help us be more present to enjoy our weekends. To think of it instead as not a humdrum regular weekend that comes around once a week, but in fact a special vacation time we can savor in ways we otherwise might not.
The importance of this time discussion is so that we could go from moving from an abstract concept to one we can manage. Anything we can do to remind ourselves to be present in the moment to savor the positive opportunities that we have in our everyday life. Connecting with those that we care about will go a long way toward time affluence and happiness. If you find yourself with a canceled meeting or half-hour break in the middle of the day you weren’t expecting, instead of working over that time, go for a walk around the block or call a friend or do something that’s more socially connected as opposed to more work-focused. Have a physical reminder about the importance of family and friends and the limited nature of time. Put something in your physical environment that helps you live with your intentions and goals so that you can capitalize on the free time that you do have available, even if the amount of time that you have is rather limited. A reminder of the fleeting nature of life, the preciousness of time, and the importance of savoring the small simple moments with the people that we care about because we never know when a conversation is going to be the last one. If you’re more deliberate in the morning, this tends to color more of your upcoming day with a sense of intentionality. Your days will feel more deliberate as you engage in more mindful activities. It’s critical to be proactive so that you’re not just waiting for a meeting to get canceled, but proactively putting blocks of time into your calendar where you’re not going to allow technology to disrupt you. These proactive blocks of time are where you’re going to work on those important goals and not be disrupted or distracted by meetings. You can hold on to those blocks as if they were your most important meetings. Putting these proactive blocks of time into your calendar twice a week for two hours can significantly reduce burnout and stress. Furthermore, leaders should encourage employees to take time off given that burnout is high. Teams are running hot and there are a lot of challenges we’re all faced with economically from a health perspective. If we are to retain our best talent, leaders are going to need to encourage those who would be the least likely to take time off to take a few days. Sometimes the most relaxing vacations are the ones that aren’t very long. Taking a few days off, three to five days, can be more relaxing than taking a couple of weeks off, in part because of all the work you must do once you get back to the office. Take a couple of long weekends to recharge and recover, and to really reframe that like a vacation and do the best you can within the circumstances to enjoy it. If you had one vacation or one day remaining, how would you spend your time? Knowing the answer to that question gets you closer to your meaningful way.
The challenge of not having enough time is shared amongst many of my clients, if not all of my clients, at some point in time anyway. Michael Altshuler sums it up best when he said, “The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” Talking through each unique situation to Study, Find, Bundle and Reframe time is something that has been helpful in improving the quality of time spent and therefore the quality of life.
To dive deeper to your situation with time, contact schedule a free consultation with Compass Anchor Coaching today.