ARE YOU SERVING TIME?

Look around you. You probably don’t see a cell, let alone iron bars. But how often do you live as if you were serving time? What would it be like if, instead, time served you?

When you challenge yourself to embrace a change that you want, you may hear an inner voice objecting that the challenge is unrealistic because you lack time. That inner voice is a clever saboteur that may seduce you to prefer the comfort of your cage to the riskier freedom of the air.

Even if you resist that seduction, the saboteur may invite you to diminish your challenge into a smaller opportunity. That smaller opportunity would be to simply manage your time a bit better and avoid the bigger work of changing your relationship with time.

Cultivate mindfulness of how you are living each moment. Mindfulness involves being self-aware, making conscious choices in the moment, and resisting reliance on habits to carry you forward. Mindfulness allows you to choose more freely how you use your time. Here are eight suggestions to help you:

1. Turn off & tune inside: How often do you feel deeply fulfilled or renewed after watching one hour of television? How genuinely re-creational is it? Be frugal with the time you devote to media. Sitting down and seeing what’s available now fosters distraction rather than mindfulness. If you have limited time, avoid it, and instead pre-schedule limited periods of viewing or listening. If you resist changing this habit, then maybe time is not the real obstacle to change you think it is.

2. Prune the shopping: How often do you engage in “recreational” shopping? How fulfilling and renewing is it? When you’re bored or edgy, do you fill your time in this or in other ways? There, you’ll find wasted time you can reclaim.

3. Beat the clock: At what time of day do you find your best energy and creativity? Try to devote it to your most important or challenging goals and tasks. You will waste less time in the long run if you play to your strengths rather than managing around your weaknesses. Many people find themselves in situations that conflict with their internal clocks, while others have simply acquired poor habits that have the same result. Learn how much sleep you need to function well. Your brain and body do some of their most important work while you are asleep, so cheating sleep is a long-term formula for poor health and wasted time.

4. Practice patience: Do you multi-task almost all the time? How well does that work for you? Does it lessen or increase your stress? Some people are gifted at multi-tasking, while many others develop an anxiety-driven habit that serves them ill. While picking low-hanging fruit can contribute to your self-confidence and sense of progress, don’t be too trigger happy. By acting too quickly you may prevent situations from unfolding or being delegated in ways that can lessen the time you ultimately need to give them. If you are prone to being trigger happy, be more cautious with the attention you give to new problems – this can help you maintain your stride in completing your existing commitments. The goal here is balance.

5. Rest and self-care are not optional: What, if anything, does a “day of rest” mean to you? Close your eyes – pay attention to what comes to mind when you think of it. What supports and moves you when you are at rest and in play? If you don’t know, you should find out. Lack of proper relaxation and self-care makes us prone to make mistakes and to waste time, and encourages us to regress to time-filling habits. Honoring relatively inviolate periods of time for rest, recreation and renewal allows you to make better use of your time.

6. Cultivate gratitude: How would you describe who you are, who you are becoming and what you have accomplished? At least daily, acknowledge and cultivate gratitude for them, instead of taking them for granted. During this time of gratitude, quickly quiet any inner voices that are eager to remind you of what you aren’t, what you haven’t completed and what you don’t have. Deep gratitude is one of your most effective weapons against wasting time pursuing goals and things you don’t really need.

7. Experience the moment: What would it be like if you were free to experience each moment as it comes and goes? That’s a life fully lived, not a cliché, and it can transform you. Paying attention to disappointment with our past and anxiety for our future can be worthwhile, if we are actually learning from it. Otherwise, it’s more likely to be a time-filling exercise. This is also true of bad moments: if you cannot experience your bad moments, your peak moments will not seem as high as they truly are.

8. Stay in tune with the purpose of your life: Who you do want to have become before you die? Life is short. Keeping in tune with your life purpose fosters harmony (not just within yourself, but with others) and empowers you to choose to use your time in ways that serve it. You will make better choices and waste less time.

As for managing the time involved in daily tasks, what tools work best for you? Structures that can help you include lists, activity journals, notepads, message reminders and a host of similar tools. Learn what works best with your personality style, because you should be the master of your tools rather than mastered by them.

Time is at least as much a function of who you are as what you do. Anxiety and distractions fill the voids created by lack of mindfulness. You will need energy and resolve to create habits of mindfulness. As with most habit changes, you should expect to do this daily for at least three weeks before the feeling of strangeness starts to dissipate, and you begin to own the change. Pay more attention to who and how you are now, and let what you do flow from that. Let time serve you for a change.

© 2007 Karl W. Saur. All rights reserved.