BLOG: "There Isn't Enough Time"

How many times have you either said or heard someone else say "there isn't enough time" or "I don't have the time?" We all, at some point, uttered one or both of these phrases, but is it really true? Is there really not enough time or are we just really, really bad at dealing with time as a commodity?

As an American society, we are really good at dealing with money as commodity. How much a person makes is a status thing and how much something costs is important to people and businesses, but we haven't elevated TIME to that same standard. It really should be the number one commodity.

Money is important but just not as important as time and the reason being is simple. If you lose $20, you can go out and get that $20 back, but once you lose 20 minutes, hours, or some other finite number, you can never, ever get that time back. It's all about managing the limited time you do have and get the most out of it.

Let's start at looking at one week.

There are 168 hours one week - seven days in a week, 24 hours in a day.

You like to get seven hours of sleep a night, that's 49 hours you spend sleeping a week. Now, you have 119 hours remaining.

Like the majority of people in America, you spend eight hours working, 40 hours a week at work brings you down to 79 hours.

If you're anything like me, you like to eat. Let's give you two hours per meal a day for food preparation and consumption (eating). Three meals a day, that's six hours per day and 42 hours in a week of preparing and eating. We're now down to 37 hours.

Eat, sleep and work are our needs in society. We need those three things to function normally (or as close to normal as possible). But we have 37 hours remaining in our time budget.

For example, myself I spend six hours a week scoring a women's basketball league in Brighton. I'm now down to 31 hours. But I'm not far from done. I also spend nine hours a week promoting Watertown's summer basketball league. I'm now left with 22 hours.

Within those 22 hours I have the time to do the things that I love to do: play golf, write this blog, search and create content for my videos of the day, watch the Red Sox, and go for walks. And some of these things may be happening concurrently.

See, there definitely is a lot of time, the problem is we are not very good, as a society, at managing that time. We are not treating time as high as we treat money. But then again there are some people that don't manage their money, which is what drives the credit card industry.

If you liked this blog, go watch the late Carnegie Mellon computer science professor Randy Pausch's lecture on "Time Management" at the University of Virginia in 2007. I've embedded it down below.