Time
A guest post by Greg Mallon.
"Good habits make time your ally, bad habits make time your enemy."
—James Clear
There is likely nothing more commonly said when someone is on their deathbed than wishing for more time. It is the one constant in our lives. It’s ticking and we will all eventually run out of it. We all likely reject opportunities claiming we do not have “the time” when, in reality, we have the same amount of time as everyone else.
Time should be the one thing in our life, especially as fathers, that we should govern as best we can as it is the most precious thing we can give ourselves, give to our children, give to our spouse, and give to our employer. As you reach your 30s and 40s, there will be many things vying for your attention and energy.
The purpose of this post is to suggest frameworks for how you should identify your priorities and dedicate your attention to than rather than let others dictate them—whether it be consciously or unconsciously. This is not a post about a hack to “cut seconds off this task”. This is about identifying and managing your minutes so that you can devote your focus to those tasks/people/events that give you the best return on the investment of your time and attention.
Over the next few decades, your employer will be the one thing likely taking the most of this valuable, dwindling resource. Many will say, “Hopefully it will be only thirty years of my life”. This may be because they do not like their profession or where they work, but inherently the feeling to want to retire comes down to simply “owning your time”. Owning your time is the largest benefit to being truly wealthy. If you have true wealth you can wake up when you please, eat lunch when you please, end your workday when you please, and travel whenever you want. Most of us will not get to retire until our 60’s, so how can we find ways to own our time as much as we can?
Managing The Fininte Moments
Here are four ways to better allocate and optimize the finite moments of our life.
Work
When you are at work, focus on your work. This should allow you to complete your tasks, prepare for what you need to do the following day, and not physically and psychologically bring it home with you.
Family
If you are not bringing work home then you are controlling your time when you are home with your loved ones. To be able to truly control your family time, keep your phone in a dresser drawer upstairs and spend the time valuably. If your phone is frequently stealing your focus, then read James Clear’s post, Four Laws of Behavior Change Applied to your Cellphone, which comes from his life-changing book Atomic Habits.
Exercise
Given the limited time you have after work with your loved ones, exercise in the early morning. Or, if you have the ability, make exercise part of your commute. Biking or running to work recaptures the time you are giving to your employer for yourself. If you work or live in a large city and have trouble getting motivated to work out in the morning I highly recommend checking out November Project. You can join their Facebook group and join a chapter near you to do regular workouts at 6:25 AM Wednesdays and Fridays. It was my first foray into early morning workouts and now I am finished working out by 6:30 AM during the weekdays.
Decision Fatigue
Decision fatigue is the exhaustion caused by the countless decisions we are faced with on a daily basis. We frequently expend unnecessary mental effort on decisions such as what to wear to work, eat for meals, and read online. Do not let these decisions affect how you spend your time later. Keep your food and dress options limited and simple. Save your decision-making capacity for things to do with your kids or significant other. For more on decision fatigue, read this or see or just consider how much time Steve Jobs spent figuring out what to wear every day.
Being present both physically and mentally for your family is worth more than that extra hour or two you could give to a project for work. Obviously, we cannot always be present and there will be things that we will miss. However, if you regain control of your time where you can then that “found time” will pay dividends in what really matters. You’ve never heard anyone on their deathbed say that they wish they could have spent more time with their co-workers.
Related: