While conducting a past year review of 2023 I was unable to complete one part of the assignment: to look back at my year and analyze how I spent my time.
Which things did I love?
Which did I loathe?
Which lead to personal growth?
And which did I feel caused a regression?
I was able to look at the broad strokes, sure. I:
- Moved back from Colombia.
- Started going to therapy.
- Did a 3 week jaunt through Europe for a friends wedding.
- Camped a bunch stateside.
- Went to the Colorado Renaissance Festival(highly recommend).
- Road tripped and camped in Glacier National Park and Yellowstone.
- Visited my family(twice) and met my niece.
- Took a trip to wine country (Northern California) for another friends wedding.
- Started a men’s support group.
- And spent a lot of time with friends!
All in all that feels like a very full and wholesome year! But if I look back on how it was emotionally, things felt very different.
Sure there were fun times and many laughs were had. But as I described in the men’s support group post there were a lot of negative emotions (and subsequently negative coping mechanisms) as well.
It is a core belief of mine that we can build happier lives for ourselves through intentionally analyzing how we live and adjusting course where necessary.
And one of the biggest ways in which we can control this is in how we spend our time.
Work is work and we all have to do it. We can try to advance in it and tailor it to our lives, change careers, etc, but it’s something we all do and it’s not my focus here.
I am interested in how we spend our time outside of work: what do we do when we punch the clock at the end of the day? Who do we do it with?
Do those things and people bring us joy, or do they suck the life out of us? Can we do different things that would be better for us? If we’re not sure, can we test out some ideas? If it is better, how can we make those changes permanent with the highest likelihood of success?
This is how I’ve thought about life for a long time. I don’t think I’ve explained this in so many words to my friends, so they might think this is a weird as hell way to do things. But I’ve thought about it for a while and haven’t been able to poke any holes in it(disclaimer: I know obvious exceptions exist), so it’ll be interesting to hear what people think.
Regardless, my problem when analyzing the last year is that I didn’t really have a good accounting of how I spent my time between those large events:
- Did I work out consistently?
- Was I eating healthy?
- Who did I hang out with?
- What did we do?
- Did I party(drink) a lot?
- And most importantly, how did my day-to-day happiness correlate with those behaviors?
To that end, I’m going to try and do a better job accounting for my time in 2024. This idea was introduced to me by a friend after he read the book How to Invest Your Time Like Money.
According to him, most of the information you need is in the title. At the beginning of each week (or on some regular basis you decide) sit down and schedule out how you’re going to spend your time each day. Do so on a calendar, and stick to it as best you can.
One downstream benefit to putting things on a calendar is that it more firmly cements them in your mind. If it’s your goal to go to the gym each morning and you put it on a calendar, it’ll be harder to accept skipping it than if you had made a quiet promise to yourself.
In the exact same fashion, I’m hoping that writing and posting this publicly will be a solid incentive for me to stick with this habit. If I write an update in a few months where I’ve failed miserably, well…that’d be a nice ego gut punch right there.
That’s all I’ve got this time, but I’ll leave you with a question: when’s the last time you’ve asked yourself if how you spend your time and who you spend it with are serving you best?
It’s a hard question, particularly as you get older and have a greater appreciation for time. It’s the one resource you’ll never be able to get more of, and the idea that you’ve been spending it poorly can fill you with dread – or even scare you out of asking the question in the first place.
But that’s all the more reason to ask it: so that you know you’re spending your limited time on this spinning rock hurtling through space the best you can.
All the best,
Brandon