How to Instantly Give Yourself More Time to Do What You Love in Life
Time is our most precious resource here on Earth.
Some of you may be able to make a compelling argument for it instead being money, but time, unlike money, cannot be earned. We can eat healthy and live an active lifestyle, both of which should extend our chances of prolonged survival, but this isn't a guaranteed formula.
Not only could we do everything we're supposed to and still fall short of the average human life expectancy -currently 79.28 in the United States -but we could also (knock on wood) be derailed by a tragic accident or some other unforeseen circumstance.
So going with the assumption that time is our most valuable resource, what is a statement we not only hear others, but also find ourselves saying far too often? "I don't have enough time."
Whether it's to justify our reasoning for not pursuing a particular goal, or it's to try and weasel ourselves out of taking the blame for something we missed, we all quite regularly complain to be short of this oh so precious resource.
In an attempt to give ourselves more of it, we tend to practice one of two main tactics: multi-tasking and addition by subtraction.
Multi-Tasking is Bulls**t
As competent as some of you may believe yourself to be at multi-tasking, I'm a firm believer that it cannot be done effectively, and just as New York Times-bestselling author Neil Pasricha says in The Happiness Equation, we don't actually do multiple things at once we just take recurring breaks from doing one thing to work on another.
Can you actually talk on the phone and drive your car at the same time with maximum proficiency being given to both tasks? Or do you quite regularly find yourself either asking the person you're talking with to repeat themselves, or slamming on the breaks to avoid a potential collision?
Addition By Subtraction is Rarely the Answer
The other approach we love to take to "mine" more time for ourselves, is to cut certain activities, responsibilities, and occasionally even people out of our lives. I'm all for this if that which is being cut is something or someone that you genuinely no longer wish to have be a part of your life, but how often is that really the case?
So instead I'd like to present a new -and much simpler -solution to instantly give yourself more time to do what you love in life:
The Addiction is Real!
According to the 2016 Neilsen Social Media Report, the average adult spends just over 25 hours per week on social media, and I seriously doubt that much of that is with a definitive purpose. Most of it begins out of habit and an unconscious addiction, and consists of time being spent looking at, reading, or watching content that has little to no bearing on our well-being.
It may seem like it, but I can promise you that I am not here to condemn social media as a whole, since I love it just as much as you do (and also recognize that you wouldn't be here reading this right now without it). But I am trying to show how much of our seeming time shortage problem is of our own doing.
It's not because we have too much on our plate, or that our family expects too much of us, or that there actually aren't enough hours in a day. It boils down to how we are choosing to spend it and the first step to changing that is by becoming consciously aware of how much is currently being consumed by an addiction we all have the ability to crack.
Remember that social media once didn't exist and we were all perfectly fine without it, so I doubt our lives will be in peril should we choose to cut back and simply go to it when we actually have a reason to.
