One More Minute…

Here goes. The top ten words my kids hear from me in a typical day:
10. Stop

9. No

8. Put

7. That

6. Down

5. Please

4. Thanks

3. One

2. More

1. Minute

I say “one more minute” roughly a gazillion times in a day. That’s a lot of minutes. Usually it’s because I’m doing something and need “one more minute” to finish up. The only problem is that “one more minute” always turns into five. And during that five minutes I realize there another thing I need to do, so I just need “one more minute” to finish that up too…

Olivia believes my calculator is her phone. She uses it to send text messages and take her conference calls.

I will make an uncountable number of decisions throughout my daughters’ childhoods that can be best summed up as “Do I spend time with you now OR later?” Of course, it is always tempting to choose “later” because the task at hand always seems more important, in the moment at least.

As Harvard professor Clayton Christensen explains in How Will You Measure Your Life, “…decision-making systems are designed to steer investments to initiatives that offer the most tangible and immediate returns,” which leads people to “shortchange investments in initiatives that are crucial to their long-term strategies.”

More importantly, he goes on to say, “I’ve seen more and more [Harvard classmates] come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. ”

Christensen articulates how some of the smartest people in the world get this wrong with really obvious regrettable long-term results. It’s why I’m in a never-ending struggle to control my heroin-esque addiction to checking email.

So what’s the other stuff taking up my time? Everything generally fall into three buckets:

1. work: email, projects, email, conference calls, email

2. household errands: paying bills, fixing stuff, stuff Pam tells me to do, mowing the lawn

3. selfish stuff: sleep, watching TV, exercise, reading the news, Facebook

The tricky thing is that there’s no right answer on how to juggle all of these competing priorities. If I ignored everything else in my life just to spend time with my kids we’d eventually end up broke and unsatisfied with really tall grass in the front yard.

At the other extreme, I’ve come to realize that my life — like most peoples, I’m sure — is a never ending to do list. There are not enough minutes left in my life, even “one more minute” at a time, to check everything off that list. If I just put off spending time with my kids until I had actual free time I would be dead and buried before I it ever happened. And along the way they wouldn’t know me very well, and that’s no fun.

There’s no simple fix here — we’ll all always have stuff competing for our time — but I hope even awareness of the tradeoffs can help me make better decisions going forward. Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, talks about how as much as you reduce friction to increase the likelihood of habit formation, you can insert friction to try and break habits. I’ve already started inserting some of these in my life — leaving the phone downstairs at night and plugged in on the counter during dinnertime being two that have worked pretty well for me!

This piece was originally posted at VersaMe.com. VersaMe created the Starling the world’s first wearable engagement tracker that helps encourage and reinforce positive parenting behaviors.