Choosing How To Spend My Time
I am constantly wishing I had more than 24 hours in a day. My list of things I want to do is never-ending, and I always seem to find more to add. On top of that, I want to spend as much quality time as possible with friends and family, stay healthy by working out, eating well, and getting enough sleep, make sure I’m keeping my home clean and in order, and I also love having free time to relax and enjoy time to myself. If I did everything I wanted to do in a day, it would probably take me at least 48 hours, if not more. At some point, I have to decide what doesn’t make the cut.
Prioritizing my time has always been extremely difficult for me. My brain struggles to discern priority levels because I treat everything like a top priority. Every task on my list is either a want to do or a need to do (in my opinion, of course, as very few things are truly “need to do”), so they all feel equally important to me. Lately, I’ve realized I need to push through this struggle and find a better way to manage what I’m putting on my plate. As I get busier and busier, I’ve become unreasonably stressed trying to manage it all. So, I decided to start from scratch and build my life back up from the foundation to figure out exactly how much time I have to work with and what makes the cut.
I’ve borrowed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for the foundational level of this process, basic needs. I’m defining my basic time needs as time to cook and eat reasonably healthy meals, work out 3 or 4 times a week, get at least 8 hours of sleep, and keep my home clean and comfortable. By my calculation (I’ve rounded up considerably because I always take longer to do things than expected), that leaves about 4 hours of free time on weekdays and 12 hours on weekends. Using these conservative numbers, that’s about 44 hours a week of free time.
That isn’t an insignificant amount of time. Even factoring in things like driving, morning and evening routines, and little things like using the bathroom, I’m confident I have 24 hours of free time at an absolute minimum on an average week. It is impossible to fit everything I’d like to into those 24 hours a week, but I can still fit quite a bit. I need to be honest with myself about what I would get the most value out of in that time, knowing that my answer will likely change from week to week. I think I’d benefit from trying to focus on the things I get to do in that time instead of being so focused on the things I don’t manage to fit in. My scarcity mindset is something I am working on, but I still have a long way to go. How do you make decisions about how to spend your time? I’d love to hear other perspectives and maybe get some new ideas!