Zen College Life

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Have you noticed that everyone really wants to do something, but nobody has the free time to do it? I’ve often wondered how people could want so badly to lose weight, get fit, read more, learn a new language, take up a new hobby, spend more time with their loved ones, volunteer, teach, write, and do so much more, but they just can’t. And why can’t they? Because they don’t have any free time.

I did a little research to find out where everyone’s free time had gone, and interestingly I found something. I found that nobody ever really had free time. They had time, but it wasn’t free. Their time was spent doing things. Most people don’t have 3 minutes in the day when they aren’t doing anything at all, and therefore nobody has free time. What people do have is time that they are spending in ways that could be better spent.

Now what does this mean in a literal sense? The reason people don’t have free time is because the time that they don’t have any obligations isn’t actually free. Its filled with many different things, most of which could be better spent if they had better discipline or prioritizing skills. Or maybe because they don’t really want it.

This is what I have come to realize. None of us have free time. We all have 24 hours per day. Some of us can manage that time well enough to do all the things we really want, but most of us can’t? Why? Because we don’t realize just how much time we waste.

A little project could show you just how much time you waste. Make a chart that breaks the 24 hour day into 15 minute intervals. Carry it around with you for one day and fill in what you are doing for every 15 minutes. At the end of the day break each interval into groups: Work, School, Sleep, eat, and categories for each of the other things you do. You may be surprised to find that you don’t have any free time because you spent 3 hours watching TV, an hour and a half chatting/browsing the web, 30 minutes on the phone, 30 minutes snacking, an hour getting ready in the morning, 15 minutes waiting in a line of some sort, an hour driving, an hour or more in the store, and many more hours doing many more things like this. (that totaled 8 hours and 45 minutes by the way)

Now if we prioritized these things, how many of them are really important? How many of them are kind of important? How many of them could be thrown away and never really missed? I’d venture to say that if you REALLY wanted to do what you say you want to, you could get rid of at least half of this, if you made a serious effort to. You could skip this weeks American Idol and Grey’s Anatomy, choose your outfit the night before, wear a haircut that requires less maintenance, make your call while driving (with a headset of course), and make a list before going to the store. These alone would save about 3 and a half hours (in terms of the person above who spent almost 9 hours doing all those things).

Do you really want to lose weight, get fit, read more, learn a new language, take up a new hobby, spend more time with their loved ones, volunteer, teach, write, and do so much more? Do you want it bad enough to sacrifice the things that you wanted previously (i.e. American Idol and Grey’s Anatomy)? If so make the sacrifice, just for a week, try it out. See if it is all that you were hoping it would be. See if it brings you the happiness and joy that you were hoping it would be. If it does, I’d love to hear about it, so be sure to leave a comment and let us all know.

Good luck, now go out there and do SOMETHING! I know I will!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!