I used to say this a lot: “I just don’t have time to get that done.”
Or: “I ran out of time and couldn’t do XYZ.”
Time eventually became my nemesis. Beat the clock. Make the deadline. Wish for more hours in the day.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
Then I was challenged by my mentor.
“You have the time. It’s about choices.”
And she wasn’t making a judgement call on the choices I was making (good thing – she was my boss at the time), she was merely pointing out: The time is yours; it’s all in the spending.
I thought of that today. I was driving home from running an errand and thought, “Too bad I don’t have time to vacuum my car.”
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
I do have time to vacuum my car, but that’s just not how I choose to spend the next 20 minutes of my life.
I think of time as a zero-sum game. If I spend an hour blogging, that’s an hour I’m not spending on my nonprofit. If I spend a day hiking, that’s a day I’m not spending writing. If I spend 15 minutes in the morning eating breakfast, that’s 15 minutes I’m not driving to work. If I spend 30 minutes on the phone, that’s 30 minutes I’m not playing fetch with my dogs or Yahtzee with my mom.
A couple years ago when I was working 10-12 hours a day managing a newsroom, someone asked me, “How are you going to make time to date?” Brutal truth = I hadn’t met anyone I wanted to trade time for.
In the current days of seemingly endless {beautiful} requests of my time, that’s how I’ve learned to view it – as my greatest commodity, and how I budget and spend it is as weighty of a decision as how I handle my finances.
The fact is that I do have time {to vacuum my car, take the dogs for a hike, read a book, spend a day at the lake, meet a friend for lunch, fill-in-the-blank}. We all do.
What are we saying yes to?
Or, perhaps more notably for those of us who always say yes, what could we say no to?
How are we meting out our time?
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