Barring tragedy, time is the one resource all of us are given in equal measure each day, rich or poor, old or young, and yet it’s a resource we’re most apt to fritter away through thoughtlessness, a lack of awareness, or a feeling that we are being given no choice. It’s easy to allow others to steal our time and so we commonly find ourselves living life according to someone else’s agenda, sometimes without realizing.
My mailbox is filled with demands from people who want my time. Perhaps they are just asking me to read their correspondence, to act on a specific request, or maybe to give them a larger chunk of my time at some future date. Not all correspondence arrives with insidious intent. “I just wanted to make you’re aware…” emails may seem benign enough, but through the remitter’s abundance of courtesy (or their desire to cover their backside) these emails are also draining you of a resource you can never recover once it has gone.
We can find ourselves living our lives according to others, much as we can find ourselves using social media according to the design of the makers, who see their apps as our Hotel California – you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube understand how humans are wired. With their pop ups, audio beeps, and shiny red bubbles we can end up acting like a cat with a laser pointer. SQUIRREL! Layer in the lure to follow breadcrumb trails leading other goodies that are similar to what we already like (how do they KNOW these things about me!) and all the endless scrolling, and our phones have turned into little pocket casinos. Social media tools can be beneficial, but only if we use them how we want and not how they want. The same is true of time – we have a choice, and we can chose to expend this resource thoughtfully, according our own needs.
Time is not the only resource we’re neglecting, we’re also failing to make best use of our energy. Unlike time not all of us feel like we have the same levels of energy. I know people who live like the Duracell Bunny, and others who seem to have only two speeds, slow and stop. But all of us have varying energy levels through the day, and different energy levels for different things during the day. What if we could match our energy with the tasks we need to perform?
There are times when we’re feeling more creative, times when we should exercise, and times when we’re depleted. We can also cultivate our energy, perhaps by talking to a certain person, or by beginning the day with a coffee, or going for a short walk around the block during mid afternoon to help us head off a lunchtime food coma.
I feel most creative as soon as I wake, perhaps because I’ve been able to carry some of my dreamtime into my wakeful state. This very article occurred to me as soon as I woke this morning. Too often I wake up and immediately check the slew of overnight alerts on my phone, dip into social media, or play a game. Before I know it I can be scrambling to catch up on the day and I’m barely out of bed.
We can also break up tasks according to the different energies they need. I wrote the notes for this article this morning but I didn’t type it up until the evening. I find editing requires a different kind of focus to drafting, and evening time works better for the more iterative development of content and proofreading. As I sit here typing this up I have my notebook open alongside me, the pages strewn with dream-infused scribbles. I refer to them from time to time, squinting as I try (sometimes in vain) to decipher my own hieroglyphics. The creative energy did its job, and I was able to capture it.
Put time and energy together. Protecting your time is good. Protecting your energy is also good, but aligning your time with your energy is better still, and when you also know how to cultivate and adapt your energy according to the needs of your schedule, then your Jedi skills will be complete.
Addendum
It’s overly simplistic for me to ask anyone to protect their time and energy, and match it to the responsibilities of the moment, and just expect it to happen. The notes above give a few examples of the ‘how,’ but the tactics required to guard your time are laid out far more thoroughly, and far more eloquently, by authors such as Nir Eyal, whose writing you can read on Medium. The tactics required to guard your time include decluttering your phone and your computer, and turning off alerts. One of the tactics that Nir mentions in his book, “Indistractable,” and which I have recently adopted is timeboxing – pre-determining what you will do at certain times of the day, and then sticking to the plan.
That is how this article came to be: I have been adopting Nir’s time boxing technique, and finding that the order in which I do things has shifted according to the energy I have at that time of the day. Credit where credit is due, thank you Nir Eyal.
