Spending time vs spending time well

Photo by Icons8 team on Unsplash

“It’s not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it’s given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well.” - Seneca

Time is our most precious resource, and yet we seem to spend an inordinate amount of our lives on things that get us nowhere, or things that sometimes take us a step backwards.

Last November I set myself the challenge of documenting what I was doing every 15 minutes of every day for 1 month in an effort to capture where my days were being spent. It was fascinating for 2 reasons:

1) I was spending a fair amount of time being “busy” with not much to show at the end of it

2) Once I started logging my time I gradually became more and more aware of what I was doing in each moment (“What gets measured gets managed” as Peter Drucker once said). I was being more present to what mattered and forgetting the rest.

There is a difference between “spending time” (like it’s money) and “spending time well” (like it’s actually a precious piece of this finite thing we each have). Its something I recommend to anyone I coach, whether they feel time-poor or not. Awareness of where we spend our time is one of the most practical forms of self-awareness there is.

What does "spending time well" look like? That's up to you. Maybe it’s time spent playing with your kids but without thinking about that neverending inbox, maybe it’s a 10-minute walk every day with no phone distractions or maybe it’s starting on that scary to-do that's been sitting there for months which you know you need to get done.

The small reframe, the simple question of “Am I spending my time well right now”? can pay dividends.