The time of our life
Time Management. People have been trying to crack this code for years. Countless books, articles, podcasts and apps have been created to help us manage our minutes more efficiently.
"Managing our minutes more efficiently." Sounds delightful. Might as well upload our souls to the cloud right now and let Chat GPT sort things out for us.
Or, we could stop treating our existence like some spreadsheet to be optimized and recognize that each unit of time is so much more than a few ticks on the clock.
It’s our life.
And how we choose to spend our life seems worthy of deeper thought than some late night scribbles on a post it note. Sure, sometimes you’ve gotta do the laundry or drop the kids at school. But that daily list of to dos can turn into several years of where the hell did my life go pretty fast.
So, instead of time management, perhaps we need to call it something else—Life Management. How do we want to spend our shockingly finite time on this planet? I recently heard Tim Urban mention a pretty startling stat—by 18 years of age we’ll have spent more in-person time with our parents than we will for the rest of our lives. In fact, we’ll have spent about 93% of that time, sprinkling the remaining 7% over the next 30-40ish years. If we’re really lucky.
We can look at any meaningful part of our life through a similar lens and come to the same conclusion: we need to spend more time doing things that matter. What does that mean for our career? Our relationships? How does it influence where we choose to live? Or where we travel? How many late night trips to White Castle do we really need? (The correct answer is 83 btw, give or take a few fuzzy memories).
This is why I love coaching. Because when it comes down to it, how people choose to spend their lives is the entire focus of the work my clients and I do together. The more intention we can put into those choices, the more likely we’ll be pleased with the moments we create.
And perhaps, when it’s all said and done, we’ll have created a life that looks pretty damn good in the rear view mirror. No spreadsheets anywhere in sight.
#coaching #beyourself #timemanagement #whitecastle