Against straight-lining your time

Do you know all those 80 / 20 rules about how 80% of results come from 20% of work? The advice is always to focus on the 20% that give us the best results and abandon the 80%. 

And that might work well for some things, but many people really misuse these principles when it comes to time management.

The thinking goes like this: well, if work is supposed to produce success, and it already takes up so much of my time, while friendships and fun take very little of my time, why not allocate MORE time to work, to straight-line the picture?

It is anyway simpler to keep the work activities on, rather than having to deal with the complexity of organizing these other activities. These activities like meeting friends and taking time to read and do my hobbies occupy only 5% of my time perhaps, but add complexity to the entire system, and I am not even sure of their return on investment, as it is not as measurable as seeing completed tasks at work. I could just simplify it to the BIG things in my life (like work), and then FOCUS on those, no?

Why keep my eyes on all these other little balls (like exercise, and meditation), when I could be just following the big balls?

Plus maintaining and organizing friendships on itself and having outdoor fun can take a lot of time! I mean it can take lots of back and forth to just even schedule a meeting with a friend (sometimes when put together longer than the meeting itself), and you might have to approach them, and they might say no. Then you might need to come up with an idea as to what to do.

Or, take fun for example. Fun that is not already easily decided for us (like the next Netflix recommendation) takes time to plan and schedule, and it can also backfire - it rains 🌧 on the day we decide to visit a farmer’s market; Or we go to a new location, and it is really not as good as one hoped for. 🤷‍♀️

But time use is less like using a big hammer to shape things with, and more like taking a multivitamin. Or like the composition of your body. While some vitamins and minerals are needed by your body in very small amounts, it doesn’t mean you can straight-line and simplify this process and just NOT BOTHER with that mineral at all. Things in small quantities can still provide an essential role in the healthy functioning of your mind and body. So you still want to have those in your diet. Because although they appear in small quantities, our body can come to a halt if we don’t have them!

It is similar with friendships and with leisure time, or time spent outdoors, time doing fitness, creative time etc. Some of these forms of time use might take up 5%, 2%, 0.5% of our time.

Because if we don’t have them in our lives, our lives can collapse if our life is not spent on them!

Well - you might say - collapse, really? Sure, you could work 70 h weeks for a while and you will not die. But how will your life feel INSIDE that time? How would it feel to not have contact with friends and people you like, to not have play, to not have creativity, or exercise? Yes, you would survive, but would you be thriving?

Lone wolves and introverts like me thought they would enjoy the pandemic’s effects of having to work from home and not see people very much tremendously.

And we did, for a while. Until we realized that we were getting miserable, and that something was deeply missing from our lives. Like social connection.

Like seeing and chatting (even for an hour a week) with someone else than our partner.

Implementing complexity, rather then over-simplifying

It might seem complex to keep all of these balls in the air at all times. But these things that will take only 2% or 0.5% or 0.2% of your time, they will really only take 2% or 0.5% or 0.2% of your time. When we don’t implement these things, it is not because we don’t have time, though we might tell ourselves that. It is because we are just focusing on the big balls, and we don’t know how to deal with the complexity of adding those little things into our lives too at the moment. However, this complexity is well worth implementing.

Adding one or two meetings with friends to your week (or at least a couple of them a month) will makes a tremendous difference in terms of how happy you will feel. Because you don’t really need that much for your needs to be met.

You don’t need perfect friendships, nor do you always need the perfect location or the perfect conversation subject. Sure, achieving a deeper intimacy with your friends is fun and feels good! But it doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth putting in that 2% of time just because you haven’t yet achieved that level in your friendships.

Your needs, your basic needs will still be met!

You will still feel much better by satisfying this 2% in an imperfect way, than by giving up this type of time use altogether because its quality is not as high as you would have hoped for....

You wouldn’t give up food for a month because you had no Michelin star chef cooking for you, would you? In fact, even if you are a poor cook and you happen to not have anyone around you with better skills treating you to their cooking, you still, quite happily understand you need to eat, and do so 😀.

Of course, implementing complexity requires a bit of help. This is what TimeRichMe aims to help you do, make sure that you have in your life all the 2%s and the 4%s and the 0.5% that make a tremendous amount of impact to your happiness, but sometimes are easy to forget while we focus on the 40% pieces of the pie.

Because having the complexity and richness of all the vitamins and minerals you need in your life doesn’t need to be complicated. And you can train it and track it right here, with TimeRichMe❗