Care to take a Personality Quiz?
I often hear people say “I don’t have time, for …..?
Truth is, we all have the same amount of time in a day, unless we’re so hung over we longer know day from night from nightmare. But, for the rest of we solid citizens, sober, and in good health….well, that’s enough banter. I’ll pick up the pace. Try to keep up.
Try this if you’re up for a slap in the face and an enlightening discovery on how you spend your time and why you never seem to have enough.
This exercise falls in the wide gap between quiz and experiment. As a rule I detest experiments, a hold over from time I wasted in Chemistry class cozying up to the periodic table, daydreaming about the mysteries of the female anatomy, and doing titrations, for reasons that still escape me, although anger still resides.
Ok, on to the business at hand. This experiment is thoughtfully simple.
1. Make a list of the things that are most important to you: family, church, close friends, job, pets, shopping for muskmelons, grand kids, exercise, biting the heads off venomous reptiles.
2. Categorize your list in order, from most important to least important. Give yourself a miscellaneous category for smoking cigars, buying new shoes, cleaning the bathrooms, and remembering your wife’s birthday.
3. Now for the grinding of teeth. Give each important part of your life a percentage of the time you WANT/NEED to spend. And of course, unlike athletes who failed math and think they are able to give 110%, you are stuck with 100%.
4. Now comes the really tough task: Not counting sleep, which to be dishonest, we shall call eight hours. Keep tract of how many hours you honestly spend on everything during the other two thirds of your day.
5. Now compare where you spent most of your time and how it matches with each of your important categories. Don’t forget to include the throw-away time you spend napping, complaining, and trying to figure out what politicians really mean.
As Dr. House often said, everybody lies. Mostly we lie to ourselves. Such as: I exercise everyday. I work fourteen hours a day! I don’t have time to read. I don’t eat very much. I spend a lot of time with my family. Don’t guess.
Sometimes your categories will overlap. That doesn’t matter. The purpose of the experiment is to figure out how to rearrange your time to put the most important things first.
Shall I offer suggestions on how you can rearrange the time? Oh, hell no! As one of my favorite talking heads said: You know the answers. You just want someone to give you easier answers.
This experiment is not to turn you into a CPA for time management. But it may stabilize your life, or at least prompt you to put the emphasis on what’s most important to you.
Even so, I had to lie when household chores didn’t make my top ten and someone suggested it should. Especially, I was told, it should come a few steps ahead of watching football and reruns of The Beverly Hillbillies. Under threat of scorn, and in self-defense, I agreed she was right. That’s the last time I’ll let her look at my list. Try not to judge me harshly. And don’t lie and tell me you really did this ridiculous experiment and found you exercised like a racehorse, spent every waking moment with your family and you use a good part of your week to feed the poor, not including freeloading family members.
Now you have to ask yourself: AM I READY FOR THE TRUTH?
Now back to The Beverly Hillbillies.
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