Ever since my work-cation in Joshua Tree, one of my favorite games to play is asking someone their answers to two questions:
- What do you wish you could spend more time doing?
- What do you wish you could spend less time doing?
It sounds simple, and you probably already have a gut feeling what your answers to those two questions would be.
But without explicitly answering those questions, you can’t evaluate your responses. Once you have defined your responses, you can begin to question your focus and exactly how you are spending your time.
Wish you could spend more time at the gym? Less time in meetings? Great. Now how can you make that happen?
This is the step so many of us miss. We are programmed to get comfortable with the status quo and accept that things are in place for good reason. Things are this way because that’s the way they have to be, right?
Absolutely not.
Once you know how you’d prefer to spend your time, perform an audit of how you’re spending it now. What are the activities you can cut out? What are the activities you can combine? Are you wasting a lot of time on social media or TV that you could otherwise explicitly structure?
Of course, there are tradeoffs. But if how you are not spending your time isn’t aligned with how you want to spend it, you owe it to yourself to make an effort to change that.