Time Affluence Versus Time Poverty

One of the greatest, ever-present challenges to our happiness is the feeling that we don’t have enough time to engage in activities that are meaningful and purposeful.

Sometimes we feel that we are constantly scrambling from one task to another, eating lunch on the go, running from appointment to appointment, always in a state of catch up, forever making compromises with the things that we really want to do.

We call this time poverty. If you feel constantly stressed, rushed, overworked or behind, you’re probably suffering from it.

Meanwhile, there are few feelings better than the certainty that you have the time, space and energy to follow your own pursuits, engage in leisure, reflect and unwind, and generally be fully present in meaningful activities of your own choosing. We call this time affluence.  

Time affluence isn’t about having an empty schedule or avoiding our responsibilities, it's about having a greater degree of control over how you use your time. So how can we increase our time affluence?

Integrity Mirror

Think about the things in your life that you want to spend the most amount of your time on. Make a list of these things. It might include hobbies, family, friends, personal growth and so on. Once a week check in with yourself, examine your list, and see how much time you made for those things. 

If it's not quite enough, what commitment to action can you take for next week to nudge things more in the direction you want to travel?

Life-Mapping

Take a week and record the number of hours you spend on all your activities from working and commuting to watching tv, reading, cleaning, paying the bills and so on. 

Add up those hours and reflect on whether you are spending your time currency where it will have the maximum positive effect. 

Make some slight adjustments so that you can spend time more frequently on the highest value activities and limit some of the time you spend on the lowest value activities. 

Prune Your Schedule

There may be commitments you genuinely have to meet. These are non negotiable. But take a look at your schedule. Are you overstretched? Is there anything you can prune so as to simplify things?

Learn to Say No

It takes a lot of courage to say no. There’s often an urge to please a friend, teacher or parent by agreeing to take on more items than you can manage. But if you never say no, the requests for more of your time will never stop. Think of this as a ‘professional no’. Give your professional no kindly and politely, but never be afraid to establish your boundaries and protect them. The more practice you get the more comfortable you’ll feel doing this, and the more people will respect your time.

Avoid the Messaging Rabbit Hole

We’ve all sat down at our desk with the intention of finishing a task. We then think, oh I’ll just quickly check my messages before I get to work. The next thing we know all the time we allocated to write that essay has passed. We went down the messaging rabbit hole. We send one short message or reply to one we received. Then another one pops up and we reply to that. Maybe there’s a message from a teacher that requires quite a thoughtful response. It’ll just take five minutes to write, you say. Thirty minutes later and you’ve still not hit send. 

You can’t control when people send you messages, and when emergencies spring up we have to act straight away. But we can generally control when we reply to messages. Ring fence time in your daily routine to check messages (but never last thing at night and not during meals). Try reducing the time you spend checking messages outside of that ring fenced time. You’ll prevent yourself frittering away time and decrease your stress. Another positive consequence is that when you do engage in messaging you can genuinely focus on it allowing you to enjoy the conversation.

Move Around, Eat Well and Stay Hydrated

Where possible, for every hour you spend sitting at your desk or in front of your computer get up and move around for five or ten minutes. Stretching your muscles and helping your blood circulate will clear your head and reduce your fatigue. 

In addition, eating a healthy meal and staying properly hydrated will then give you more energy at the end of the day. You can use that energy doing those meaningful and purposeful activities that you want to. 

Recovery

Making more time for ourselves is not enough to feel time affluence. We also need to focus on recovery. In an age of wifi, smart phones, and even electrical lights we have created habits and routines that have ignored or postponed our need to recover. We just keep going until we pass out. Then we get up and repeat the process.

Without recovery we cannot stay energetic, we get sick more often, we think less clearly, we make poor decisions, we get into more squabbles. Without recovery we can become trapped in a decaying orbit of feeling low and alone. 

Make recovery a right you protect. For some people recovery might feature a fun evening with friends. For others, recovery might feature a quiet evening on your own. For all of us, it requires getting some exercise. Eating well and staying hydrated is also important. Get a reusable water bottle, fill it in the morning and carry it around with you. Think about what fuel you put inside you: the right breakfast, lunch and dinner can restore you. And do not ever mortgage your sleep. 

Create a Recovery Tool Kit

This could be a piece of paper or a note on your phone. List all the things you know that assist your recovery. At the end of your school day, spend a minute looking at the list and asking yourself ‘what type of recovery do I need today?’ It may be that you need to do all the things on your list, or just one of them, or a combination.  There is no strength in burning out. Human beings need recovery. So give yourself permission to be human. You’ll feel better for it.