(1/3) How we spend our time — are you asking yourself the right questions?
When was the last time that you audited your life?
Have you recently asked yourself what was working well, what’s not working at all, and what seems to be missing?
You might create budgets for your finances, and fitness plans for your health, but how often do you audit the activities on your calendar? If our time is a finite resource, then shouldn’t we budget it with scrutiny?
I suspect a reason we overlook this type of self-care so often is that it’s hard to quantify. When you organize your finances there is a discrete value to optimize on, money. Optimizing for happiness isn’t as simple, and no metric or set of questions could possibly act as a catch-all for this problem.
Some of the questions I try to regularly ask myself include:
- How do I feel about the decisions that I’m making?
- How do I feel about the ways that I invest my time?
- How do I feel about the amount of effort that I’m putting into this process?
The last question is important, it helps to ensure that I’m not taking a passive role in my life, while also preventing me from trying to plan every aspect of the future (which would be futile).
This three-part series likely won’t contain any information that you don’t already know. It will talk about the excuses we make, the barriers we build, and what self-investment looks like. This series will hopefully contain some information that, when we hear it regularly, helps us to stay on track, and continually re-evaluate our priorities.
Let’s start by talking about why we aren’t doing this already, in part 2/3.
