Aside from attending ugly sweater or company Christmas parties, things always slow down during the holiday season… unless you run a catering or event company that throws holiday parties. I don’t run either, which means a little extra time to get other things done. Rather than binge watch Netflix or all 5 movies in the “Die Hard” series, I decided I would find my time.
Every night, as we’re lying in bed, my wife shows me pictures of our girls over the years. Everyone told me the days would be gone before we knew it. I believe them. As I look back on a period of time as small as a single day, I frequently ask myself, “What did I accomplish? If I were to look back at this day a year from now, would I see just another day or would I see the beginning of something new… the continuation of a legacy to be proud of?”
Having food on the table is a good gauge of how well my family and I are provided for, but the question I’m most interested in is whether or not I truly fed myself and my family. Food feeds the body and gives energy to the cells that comprise our bodies do what they’re designed to do – grow, shrink, digest, flex, breathe. How am I feeding the spirits and souls of myself and my family so they can grow, move, be strengthened, breathe? Have I spent my time wisely investing in myself, my “job” as a husband, as a father? I spend 100% of my days on this earth in this physical body. Did I invest wisely in it?
I was in a conversation with a friend the other day and came to the realization that my JOB is to be a good husband and father; my CAREER simply whatever it is I do to ensure I have the appropriate resources to do my JOB well.
Money can buy most anything, but it can’t buy time. Time is, by far, the most precious and fleeting resource we have. You cannot create a time savings account and pull an extra hour out of it whenever a deadline is drawing near. As soon as it is accumulated, it’s spent.
During the time you spent reading this, everyone and everything contained inside the boundaries of the known and unknown universe has experienced the same duration of “time”… unless you live in or around a black hole or rift in the space/time continuum.
I am convinced that the biggest key to doing my JOB well is to manage my time effectively. If I don’t know where the time is going, managing that time becomes exponentially more difficult, if not impossible. I need to find my time. How much time do I need in any given week, month, quarter, and/or year to do my JOB well?
I dug into that question and here’s what I came up with:
In any given calendar year, I need approximately 1510 hours for my family, 2336 hours for myself, and 210 hours to maintain my home. There are about 736 hours of one-time projects that are either lingering/unfinished items or are on the “honey-do” list for the house. If you assume a 16-hour day (8 hours for sleep), that means just over 69% of my time in any given year is necessary to take care of myself and my family well. That means I have 31% (about 35 hours per week) of remaining time to use to address my career, attack that “honey-do” list,… or watch a bunch of Die Hard movies.
Oh, and before you start hammering me about the “disproportionate” amount of time I’m spending on myself, over 30% of that time is allocated to eating (all three meals) and “grooming” (combined total of 2 hours per day). I can bathe less or eat less… neither seems like a good idea to me.
The best thing about this schedule is I am able to write in time for myself to do nothing (2 hrs/wk), to watch Die Hard, to work on a hobby (10 hrs/mo), to be with my friends (8 hrs/mo), to take care of me. Those numbers will likely change through this process, but for the past 8-9 years, my approach has been to spend all my time either working or taking care of my family. I have nearly completely neglected myself. Those days are about to change.
Today is Thursday, December 6th, 2018. You don’t have to wait for the new year, the first day of the month, or even the first day of the week to start something new, to put a marker down and refuse to allow things to stay the same. Today is my mark. Today is the day I start to find my time.
PS: If you’d like to know how I went about finding my time, simply add a comment below, send a message via Facebook, or give me a call. If enough people show interest, I’ll start a series on the process and what I am learning along the way. I’ll even work on making the resource I developed available in the next post on the subject. It’s in a very “rough draft” form at the moment – needs a little face-lift prior to release.
Ok, spill the beans!