It’s Your Time

Most people want to do a better job of managing their time. We all want to feel wise and productive, but few of us can honestly say our hours are spent both wisely and with purposeful intent. In fact most of us intuitively know we waste plenty of time each day; but lacking any data, lacking any facts or sense of urgency, we rationalize and minimize and drift along on the currents of habit.

Most of us need a breakthrough. We need to look squarely at the problem, break it down to specific data and facts, and supply ourselves with enough reason and emotion to actually change.

For example: What has a lack of time-management skills cost you so far in your life? Do you have a specific dollar-amount answer to that question? If you’re making $16 per hour, or $33,000 per year, then 15 minutes of your time is worth about $4. That makes each and every 15 minute interval in your life equal to double-tall latte or a gallon of gas!

So choosing to spend an hour in the coffee shop, every day, including weekends, for one full year is worth $5840 of your time. With this amount of cash you could spend a month in Europe or you purchase a two year old Toyota Corolla! (Happily for the characters in Seinfeld, their coffee-shop-hours resulted in a long-running “show about nothing.”)

The point is to become aware of the value of your time and how you spend it. Say you find yourself watching TV for half an hour. Seems innocent enough, right? But in reality, you’ve just now spent $8 of your valuable time. Maybe it was a really, really good show, the season finale of American Idol or something, and maybe you’re very happy with your purchase! But now you can begin to connect the expenditure of your time with trade-offs against your goals and dreams of a better career, better fitness and weight loss, and more long-term financial success, etc.

Assigning a monetary value to our time, in 15 minute intervals, makes us aware and possibly less willing to waste time watching (another) late-night Seinfeld rerun – especially when we could be sleeping or exercising or reading the next chapter ahead in our Macro-Economics class.

According to Eurodata TV Worldwide, the average ballpark-American spends over four (4) hours per day glued to the television. This may seem incredible, and perhaps the word “glued” is a bit strong, but still, can this be possible? Do we really spend one-fourth of our waking hours in front of a TV? Apparently it is true and, in fact, we’re not even in first place anymore. Japan now heads the pack and enjoys a five (5) minute lead over the USA in the race to the couch-potato finish line. (Japan is four hours, 29 minutes; USA is four hours, 25 minutes.)

Awareness begins the process of change. Pay very close attention to the time you spend. Keep a journal / log in 15 minute intervals for one full day. Repeat the exercise again in one week. Compare the actual results with your expectations. The answers are all within you!

Teach Your Children Well...

On Teaching
SCB Jan 2008

Maybe the older we get, the more we start thinking about The End. Maybe we start seeing ourselves as finite, as something that is definitely, one of these days, going to end. And then maybe that fear drives a whole bunch of things – scaring us into making scrap books and writing stuff down – just, you know, for the sake of posterity. And does anybody even know what ‘posterity’ is for God’s sake?

I remember back in my mid twenties and I was thinking about the lifespan of stars. Not celebrities and movie stars but real stars. Taking this one astronomy class and we’re talking about how all stars go through this whole ‘aging’ pattern from birth to death and it suddenly occurred to me that, one of these days, the sun will die! Our sun! Our lucky old sun is just going to up and run out of gas - one of these days. It made me feel really sad, for a minute or two, because in your twenties, nothing sticks for very long. Then I did the math and figured out that, hey, in seven hundred million fifty thousand years from now - I probably won’t even be here.

So anyway my mom is in her 70's and has a tendency to always be trying to help and teach us kids of hers - even though we are quite grown up. Like one day, apropos of the nothing, she says to me:

Now Steve you travel a lot more than I do, and I am sure you already know this, but I will tell you anyway, you should never throw those electronic hotel key cards in the trash because people will dig around and fish them out and sell them to people who know how to get your personal information, credit card numbers and your social security number and such off these key cards.

So okay Ma I will definitely try to remember that next time…

Deep down I know she’s thinking: “Hey, maybe I can help out and this piece of information really should be passed along and not stop with me…” So really she’s just trying to pass some things along and make the world a safer and easier place to live. I guess maybe she just wants to be remembered. Is that such a bad thing? Seeing things at this level, I can resolve not to let her “fear of being forgotten” drive me further away from her.

Recently the garage door opener was shaking and rumbling up and down, getting louder and louder, until finally I squirted some WD40 along the chain. Now it works like a champ! Smooth and quiet. I thought to myself “Man I forgot how well that WD40 works on stuff. Every time I remember to use WD40 on the garage door opener, it works! Then I thought: maybe I should tell someone? I mean what if I was to die tomorrow and my son and my daughters don’t even know about this?

I laughed at myself for the absurdity, even as I climbed the stairs to my son’s room, peeked in, and said Hey Jake whats up and hey let me show you something down in the garage okay... its all about the wonders of WD40 and garage door openers. I could see his face. He was like: Dang my poor old dad is so completely random. I wonder if he’s got old-timers?