Five Ways To Waste Your Day
Everything you own now will either be rust or dust or be owned by someone else in 100 years time.
Critical Principle 5: Everything you own now will either be rust or dust or be owned by someone else in 100 years time.
Think about that! Therefore you don’t actually “own” anything; in effect you are leasing it. The one thing you do actually “own” is your time. Time is the most precious commodity you have. Unfortunately it is a diminishing resource so you must use it wisely.
How you spend your day is your business. But you don’t want to get to the end of your life and look back on thousands of wasted hours.
The worst ways you can waste time in your day:
1. Not Planning It
If you don’t think ahead you can find yourself with an hour to spare and nothing worthwhile to fill it with. By default you might end up window-shopping, channel-flicking or dozing. Always have a plan for your day and a list of things to achieve. If you know you might have to wait for a bus or an appointment, take a good book with you. If you know you will have an hour in town between appointments make a list of the people you need to buy birthday or Christmas presents for. If you know that in any given week you have a couple of evenings free, decide ahead of time that you are going to start on a project or finish something on the house.
2. By Letting Other People Waste Your Day
Are you doing things that other people should be doing? If so they are stealing your time. Are people wasting your time with long phone calls, unproductive meetings, being late for appointments? They are stealing your time. Are your friends or partner asking you to join them in unproductive activities? They are stealing your time. You need to make a conscious decision to stop letting other people take away your most precious resource. Practice saying “No” and claim back your day.
3. By poor use of “Stress Relief” or “Leisure Time”
Yes we all need these times, and they are an important part of re-charging ourselves, but some activities are energy-sapping and some take much longer than we need. If you need to take half an hour to chill out, read a good book not a trashy magazine. Learn to play the guitar or piano rather than TV channel surfing. Listen to some great music rather than playing a computer game. Also if what you really need is half an hour of down-time, don’t start watching a two-hour movie! Sure good movies are great but plan what you want to do rather than just falling into it and finding you have just lost another evening, never to be seen again!
4. By watching more than a couple of hours of TV a week – see the chapter on TV.
5. By sleeping more than you need to.
Most people need an average of eight hours sleep a night. But some people sleep a lot more than they need to. Did you know that if you spend an extra hour in bed every night you lose 23 days a year!
Let me show you what I mean:
One hour a night x 365 days a year = 365 hours.
365 hours divided by 16 awake hours per day = 22.8 days!
If you sleep more than eight hours a night and don’t have enough time in your life, you have just found a solution.