Last updated on October 29th, 2020 at 04:39 pm
What good is a schedule if you’re not going to use it?
That’s what I found myself asking aloud Sunday morning as an 8:12 bus never showed, only to be suspiciously followed by two buses at 8:21.
But as I grow older, it becomes increasingly evident to me that we are indeed slaves to time. If it doesn’t show up in my Google Calendar, it’s probably not happening. We take shorter lunches, work longer hours and get less sleep to be better than the next guy.
Oh yes, indeed—time has a firm grasp on us!
So how do we get time back on our side? What can we do to stop watching the clock and get us back to the point where we look forward to each day rather than dread going over our overbooked calendars?
1: GET A JOB YOU LIKE!
Okay, I know that it’s a bad economy and we should all be thankful for what jobs we can get, but seriously—we’re talking about 8-10 hours of your life daily here. Many of us would have life way easier if the stuff we do in our spare time were the things we did for a 9-to-5.
If instead of working, then taking care of everything you need to do at home plus your errands, and only after that getting to do the things that you really want to, you could simplify it to work and the rest of your life, can you imagine how much grief would be getting off of your plate?
2: TAKE A DAY OFF
It’s important to have a day solely to yourself if at all possible. For me, those are Saturdays. With Sunday being a church day and Monday through Friday seeing all manner of work and social events, Saturday is the only day where I don’t need to change out of my house clothes and do anything.
We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that we need to use our weekends to get those things we can’t otherwise get done in the week, when perhaps—and this is going to sound ironic coming from me—with some better planning, perhaps we can find a few hours here and there after work and on lunch breaks to get the things done that we often dread doing on the days starting with “S”. Of course, this is coming from the perspective of a recently-married man with a 9-to-5 job and no kids, so if you want to call me a little biased on this one, I can take it.
3: YOUR LIFE’S ONLY AS RICH AS THE THINGS IT’S FILLED WITH
Our lives are not the sums of what we can check off on our to-do lists or how many hands we shake and babies we kiss—if we don’t use our time to do things that’re meaningful to us, then all the time we spend will feel hollow and unimportant. You need to figure out what that is and do more of it! Do as much of it as possible!
So the next Monday I go into work, ask others how their weekends were and hear one of the following:
- “Nothing special.”
- “You know, same ol’, same ol'”
- “Just ran some errands.”
I think I’m going to point them to this post. Because you know what? If we don’t make an effort to make our weekends way more special than the weeks we’re trying to escape from when we get home to rest on Friday nights, are we really ending anything at all?
–Casey E. Palmer
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