How you measure or calculate time will give a useful indication of your respect for time and whether it will be your ally or adversary.
Do you measure time to get somewhere based on your best ever journey? Worst? Median journey time? Do you include the time it takes to put on your shoes and coat, walk to the car, get the sat-nav ready with the address, find parking, walk to the location, pass security, wait for and ride the lift/elevator and be in a queue at the reception desk? Or do you just measure A to B time and then wonder why you are often several minutes late.
When you sign up for a course that is three hours long every Thursday for four weeks, do you think that it is just 12 hours of your time committed? Or do you realise, and factor in, that it is maybe 17-20 hours more (pre course prep, travel each week – both ways, review notes, prep for test, arrive early and chats at the end), making it about 30 hours in total of time allocation?
And when you add the course into your life for four weeks, do you also subtract out about 30 hours of something that is already there? You will have to sacrifice something in order to allow space for the course. You may sacrifice time with friends, time eating, time at work, time with your family, time with tv or other (social?) media, or time sleeping – which, to be fairly realistic, this is usually the first casualty of more.
People tend not to give as much thought to what they will be removing from their life as they do to what they will be adding in to their life. This one little observation is, I believe, one of the key reasons many people can’t stick to a New Years resolution. It’s unsustainable to add almost 7 hours a week to your schedule without subtracting 7 hours as well. After several weeks of trying to cram the usual activities, plus something more, into a 24 hour period, and a seven day week, usually we start to get sleep deprived, exhausted or ill, and we try to revert back to how it was without the more.
So next time you are looking for something new to add into your life, prime yourself for success: make sure you remove something which requires a similar amount of time (but not sleep). You’ll feel better for it, keep your commitment for a longer time and maybe find that the other activity wasn’t really bringing enough joy to your life to keep it in there anyway.
If you found this post, about time, to be usefully thought provoking, I suggest you also have a look at The Thrill of Being Early.