How to Give Your Life the Time It Needs?
Measuring Your Length of Time – Part 2
How is time impacting the business called your life?
Do you have enough time to do the things that matter in your life or are you struggling to find time? Or are you wasting time and don’t really see it as a waste?
In our previous web-post, we discussed the facets that impact your time: your job, your work, and your life. We need to spend just a little more time with this last facet, our lives. Let me remind you that there is no separation between your job, your work, and your life when it comes to time. Time will never respect any of these facets, neither will time show favoritism towards one over the other. This is all on you. With that said, popular thinking will have you think your time for each is seperate. The world around us makes it seem that the 40 hours you work on a job doesn’t interfere with the other facets of your life. By now you and I know that’s wrong.
The Thought or Concept:
The business of your life
This facet known as your life is what I call the business of your life. If your job and your work all have strategies for accomplishing goals, so should your life. If your job and your work require you to have scheduled appointments, meetings, and project plans, then so does your life. Otherwise, you’ll never accomplish anything for your life because you’ll never be able to find the time. “Find the time.” Do you know that you’ll never find time just laying in wait until you pick it up. There’s no extra time sitting on a shelf somewhere for you. Until you begin to make time (what I mean by that is schedule it), you’ll never have the time you need to do life. You’ll have a life, but it will fail to give you what you want out of it.
The Practice:
Managing Your Life Requires You To Put The Segments Together
I’ve broken life down into three time-categories. I’m sure you can come up with more. No matter how many you come up with, you’ll need to put them altogether in order to manage your life, which is your business, in the time you have allocated for it.
Let’s look at the three areas.
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- The job. If done correctly, your job will and can be a part of who you are. When you’re able to work within your gifts, skills, and talents, you will not want to separate it from your life. Another side effect of separating your job from your life, is that your family, your spouse, your children will never get to know the whole you. They will only see a portion of who you are.
There were days where our jobs were separated from how we lived. We’d go off to our places of employment, spend a third or more of our day (live another life) and come back home to be yet a different person. This happens to the normal person everyday and one reason is we’ve never set and honored the appropriate time allocations for our complete life.
Can you see a problem with this? Who are you? Are you the person in your office or on the job? Or are you the person your family sees at home? Many times it’s the former. The folks on the job know more about you than even your own family. I call this a “segmented life.”
- The job. If done correctly, your job will and can be a part of who you are. When you’re able to work within your gifts, skills, and talents, you will not want to separate it from your life. Another side effect of separating your job from your life, is that your family, your spouse, your children will never get to know the whole you. They will only see a portion of who you are.
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- Church or religion. The same habit can follow us into our church life. For some, church life can be the worst. We all (the majority, the norm) have pretended to be someone else at church. We get all dressed up. The family is altogether, but at home we can’t even eat together. What gives? We’ve fallen prey to a “segmented life.” The answer begins with setting and respecting time allocations for the different facets of your life. When they get out of whack, someone usually gets left out and those are usually the people in your home and personal life.
You’ve not set a plan for how all of this works together. And when you don’t have a plan, the “common” plan for all prevails. This means you have a “segmented life” because that’s normal.
- Church or religion. The same habit can follow us into our church life. For some, church life can be the worst. We all (the majority, the norm) have pretended to be someone else at church. We get all dressed up. The family is altogether, but at home we can’t even eat together. What gives? We’ve fallen prey to a “segmented life.” The answer begins with setting and respecting time allocations for the different facets of your life. When they get out of whack, someone usually gets left out and those are usually the people in your home and personal life.
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- Home or personal. Sometimes I don’t know whether to say “home” or “personal”. Let me distinguish the two as they are in my mind:
- Home. This is the person who has a family or someone to whom they should be accountable, home life.
- Personal. This is the person who is usually single and is not accountable to another, personal life.
- Neither is more important than the other. They both have advantages, disadvantages, and require a plan.
- Home or personal. Sometimes I don’t know whether to say “home” or “personal”. Let me distinguish the two as they are in my mind:
If you’re normal, you make this part of your life the least important and it’s not intentional. You don’t believe you make it the least important, but note that time is the most valuable commodity you have. When you take it from the ones you love and give it to your job, what you’re saying (whether you want to or not) is that your job is more important. You just gave to it something you can never get back and make more of. Even though you work to provide and support your family, the way you allocate your time says something totally different.
Your life is a business, it requires the best time management practices that you can find, no different than what you do at your place of employment. It (your time) requires more discipline than what average people give it, if you want to make the best of your whole life.
Today is Friday!
No one is taking your time away, you’re giving it away. And who you give it to, determines who you value the most.
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