One of the greatest motivators towards simplicity, minimalism, decluttering, removing everything except the most important, is when we really look at how little time we have.
Now, I’ve looked at how, you know, you can look at your life in terms of overall time, and if we say, OK, I have 10,000, 20,000 days left, yeah, that seems like a pretty short time in a way.
Maybe it’s a large number, but very finite.
But there’s another way to look at it that I find really even further shrinks down the feeling of how much time I have, and really inspires me to really focus in on only the most important things.
Because when we look at our time, we can start by simply saying OK, you know, everybody gets 24 hours in a day.
24 hours in each of these days.
But how many hours do we really get, that we can control, that we can use flexibly, that we can put to use to do what we want in a free way? We start with the 24, and immediately take off all the basic maintenance hours.
So we have all our time for sleep, eating, exercise, cleaning, and you know, all that together can easily take more than half.
And you know, you can’t just skimp on those.
You know, it’s such a convenient target and an easy target to want to cut into sleep, because “Wow, that’s just so much time in which I’m doing nothing at all.
And I hear that some people are OK with 6 hours.
Why don’t I just sleep 6 hours?” You know, it’s such a tempting target to be able to shave off hours from our sleeping time so that we can put them to our productive use.
But, some people might be able to do it, but it seems like for most people, and including me, if I try to take too much away from sleep, it will only reduce my ability to do anything during the rest of the time.
So as tempting as it is to shave off from the biggest chunk of time we have, it’s simply necessary time that I need to be able to recover my energy and be able to have this foundation.
Sleeping, eating, exercising makes the foundation.
And cleaning too, to keep everything in good order.
So that makes the foundation, and I can’t really skimp on that without paying the price somewhere else.
And you know, often that leads to being sick.
If we don’t take care of the foundations, we can get sick, and then we’ll have to pay with our time in some other way, usually a very unpleasant way.
So we can’t really skimp too much on that.
Then we have the basic making of our income so that we can support ourselves.
And that seems to take a lot of time.
Of course.
I mean, the hours that we have to spend just to pay the rent and pay for food as the basics of our survival: that takes many hours on top of that.
And it may also involve things like travelling.
It may involve all sorts of extra time in various places that tends to sneak in to different parts of the schedule.
We can sort of have an assigned block, but then we do extra things maybe send emails, or do something that just sort of spreads.
The time blocks, any time block, can really kind of just spread to things around it, and it’s sometimes hard to keep everything nicely contained within the time that it seems like it’s “supposed” to take.
So you know, once we add up all the things that we have to do, then there’s often only going to be a few hours a day left.
And even that, you know, could even be an hour.
And then usually, if we’re so busy the rest of the time, when we finally get an hour or two, maybe we need some time to be able to relax, because we can’t just run ourselves like machines continuously with only sleep as our break.
We need to have some kind of downtime to be able to restore our ability to do work, I believe, and I’ve found that when I try to push myself too hard, I eventually rebel against my schedule and say “No, I’m gonna take a break now.” So we need some of that downtime too.
So at the end of all this, what looks like a day, it looks like I have many days ahead, but each of those days seems to have only a very short window of time where I can actually do something of my choice, where I can have completely free time that’s available to do things that I consider important.
So when I see how easily the time fills up, just as if when you think of those 24 hours they’re so long, and yet they just fill up like they’re hardly anything at all.
And when when I feel how easily that time fills up, it really inspires me to look for any way that I can simplify how I live.
Anything that can make the things that I have to do every day the simplest possible they can be, so that I can have this open and available time to do things that I really consider to be important.
So I’d be curious to hear how you manage this, and how do you manage to find time to do anything?
#notime #simplifytime #timeminimalism