The Best Use Of Your Time Varies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-tqekrOUYo

I’ve got burritos in the oven so we’re not going to waste any time chitchatting. An interesting observation I’ve had over the last year or so is that the value of your time varies. I think that’s a poor explanation so let me try to rephrase that.

Over the course of a day, week, month, year, and even your life as whole the “best” use of your time varies. I’m still struggling to articulate my thoughts, so let’s look at an example of what I’m trying to say.

When school is in session I rarely socialize on week nights. It’s not because I don’t understand the value of socializing, it’s because I already have juggling practice, homework, and possibly a blog post to write.

I still socialize on occasion during the week, but it’s the exception rather than the norm because socializing would require me to take a day off of juggling. Of course, you could argue that I could just juggle twice as much on the weekend and everything would be ok right? Wrong, and the reason is that while some skills can be practiced in marathon sessions others can’t.

Running five hours each Saturday is completely different than running one hour five times per week. On the other hand, while social momentum is important (if you’re anything like me), you can still develop your social skills fairly quickly by immersing yourself in social situations over the weekend, and focusing on other things during the week.

Therefore, at different times of the day and different days of the week your time may have different value. This isn’t a complex concept, but I think it’s something that rarely occurs to most people on a conscious level.

If you’re looking for a job, but are always busy with homework during the week it may be intelligent for you to consider pursuing a job that works mainly weekends. Perhaps you could consider being a soccer ref. It’d also be intelligent to consider batching your errands for the weekend.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to develop your socials skills and want to work during the week you could look for a job babysitting after school.

Looking at things from a day to day basis, something I encourage people to do is take advantage of having a full reservoir of will power in the morning and eat their frog. By attempting to do your most difficult task early in the day you have the greatest chance of doing it.

Doing this also allows you to batch maintenance work such as email, cooking, cleaning, etc, for the end of the day when you lack the ability to focus or do heavy mental processing.

Alternatively, you can also spend the end of your day in a complete relaxation. Doing so will recharge you for the next day, and you won’t even have to feel guilty about it because you’ll have already accomplished all you’ve needed to for that day.

Again, I know that the concept of there being a variance to the best use of your time is a fairly simple one, but applying it is a quick way to bring improvements to your life with relatively little effort.

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Awesome addition to this concept by my buddy Huan Nguyen. “If it helps any other readers, I think of this as current time being affected by other time. If, for example, I’ve spent the last two hours focused on homework, I now have a depletion of willpower, and taking that into account, it might be better to not try to force through another two hours, and instead do something I still need to do but that’s less mentally intensive, like work out.”

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