Human life as we know it is always chasing three key factors in life – time, money, and health. Always out of time, never have enough money, and always the desire to have better health. We would do anything to have more time, more money, and better health – yet we’re terrible at managing all of those.
Why is it so hard for us to be fulfilled with all three? There is a monumental amount of material available online to learn from, so why can’t we get to a point where we’re happy with what we have? What is it exactly that keeps us hungry for more and never really satisfied?
We’re always running out of time and late to most things, always wishing to own the next best thing and always wanting to look better. Without these at an equilibrium generally results in stress, anxiety, and even depression. All of these habits are closely related…
Over the next three weeks, I’ll be writing about the three topics week by week to articulate how we can slowly change our habits and daily decisions to make a big impact on our lives.
Time
When it comes to time, it’s easy for us to say ‘ah ran out of time’. People that complain most about time are those who are particularly bad at managing their own time. The ones that don’t complain are the ones that are more efficient and always seem to have more time. How do they manage to achieve more than others? What is it that they do, that others cannot seem to conquer? Well, first we need to understand what we spend our time doing! When I was going through a patch of ‘I wish I had more time’, I wrote down exactly what I spent my time doing for a whole week and the results were shocking…
According to research an average household spends 1095 minutes on watching TV per week (that’s 2.5 hours per day); on average, Australians also spend 100 minutes (1.7 hours) on social media each day. That’s nearly 17.5% of our weekly time (168 hours). People who have less time have trained their behaviour over many years of non-productiveness. As a male in my 30s, my numbers were something similar. It occurred to me that I spent a lot of my time consuming information that was not relevant to me, wasn’t teaching me anything, and most importantly wasn’t fulfilling my purpose of ‘achieving something’, the feeling of reward you get when you’ve completed a task – my dopamine levels were running bone dry. Which left me feeling unsatisfied and generally depleted. While I was fully satisfied with my work in a highly challenging role, I was feeling unsatisfied in my personal life.
To change my thought process around, I restarted replacing social media with learning something instead. So out went Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and they were replaced with Audible, Ted talks, and upskilling YouTube videos. Episodes of Dexter, Game of Thornes, and The Walking Dead got replaced with documentaries of high achievers like Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, and Warren Buffet. Slowly, I was digging deeper into their habits and learning about how they spend their days.
The biggest realisation and most common theme out of all of them was that they spent less time doing things that didn’t teach them anything and more time on learning activities and being inquisitive. In other words, they spent more time on productive activities than on non-productive activities (and no, binge watching a series in a single weekend, is NOT considered productive time!). Suddenly it became clear to me that if I were to cut out my poor habits spent not learning and replace them with learning habits, it will at least add more value to my life. This literally meant that I would stop before I turned on the TV and caught myself out to ask myself, is this going to teach me something or going to kill my brain cells instead (think MAFS!)? This simple awareness equipped me with better decision making skills. So slowly I started removing myself from funny Facebook posts, following useless celebrities from my twitter feed, and unfollowing people from Instagram that didn’t add any value to my life. Apart from the series I was watching at the time, I resisted the temptation to try new series to avoid getting hooked on them completely. Before I knew it I felt more energised, more motivated, and generally more alive. Once this became second nature, I found it pointless to watch TV and sold it (that was 3 years ago), stopped Facebook completely (unless for business use), and removed twitter from my phone. Suddenly, I had more time, was more organised, and started doing more than ever before.
It isn’t that we don’t have enough time, it is that we don’t know where we bleed our time. Where an hour or two simply passes us by without us knowing. If we can become more mindful of how we spend our time, we can slowly change the habits that suck our time dry. The only difference between high achievers and others is the choice they make with their time.
