Time

As I said last time, we have only two weapons in our personal arsenal: time and money. I talked about money last time. Now, for time.

Mihaly Csikszentmkihalyi, in Flow; The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York, Harper and Row, 1990, talks about attention structures. I don't know if he calls them that, but that's what they are. An attention structure is an entity that describes how you allocate your attention.

Richard Lanham, in The Economics of [Attention]; Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago, IL; University of Chicago Press, 2006) calls our time the age of attention. We now have everything we need, so companies compete over the who gets attention.

We may be what we eat, but we are also what we pay attention to. If we watch soap operas or reality programs only, we become one kind of person. If we watch politics on CNN all the time we turn into another kind of person. If we pay attention only to the drug addictions of well-healed movie stars, we are another kind of person. Sports, another, and so on and so on.

We have to use our time like our money, as a scarce resource, which it is. We have only so much time allotted to us, so we have to use it wisely. If every penny spent is a penny lost, then every minute spent is a minute lost. You have to make sure that what you are pay attention to is working for you.

That doesn't mean you don't take a break, go on vacation, sit down and chat with somebody in a coffee shop. It just means you have to have a plan on how to use you time productively.

So keep a log of what you spend your time on. Just take a piece of scrap paper or a paper towell or something and for a week, write down everything you do, just like you were keeping track of expenses. Keep track of minutes. You don't have to be precise. Use 15-minute blocks if you want.

I keep track of it in hours, to only the 100th of the hour, in decimals. For example 15 minutes is .25 hours (15/60=.25). 10 minutes is .17 hours (10/60=.17). 50 minutes is .83 hours (50/60). You don't have to do it that way; I do because it makes the math a lot easier than trying use base 60 math, which I'd have to do otherwise. You don't have to keep it to two decimal points either, one might be enough. You don't have to convert 43 minutes to .71666666 hours, .7 might do. I would convert it .72 hours. But that's me.

Whatever procedure you use, it's important that you be consistent and that you be rigorous and complete. You shouldn't just do it for a few hours on Monday, then Saturday night, and the next Wednesday. Do it every day for a week. If you forget or get involved with something else, as soon as you realize you've fallen off the wagon, go back and estimate the best you can.

After you've done it for the designated period of time, add it all up and see what you're spending your time on. Excel works extremely well for this, but if you're more comfortable by hand, do that, use a calculator, or an adding machine, abbacus, slide rule, whatever. If you haven't done this, you may be surprised. You probably don't even realize how much time you spend watching sports. We become very unaware of ourselves unless we hold ourselves accountable.

Then compare it with your goals and objectives. For example you're goal is to become more aware of drama, and you're spending 8 hours a day watching VH-1, you might want to make some changes.


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