An experiment of time management.
Like most of us I spend time on social media and using You tube for a variety of reasons. I was driving along and thought to myself I wonder how many times I pick up my mobile device and go online. My perception said oh definitely not very much at all. So I decided to check the settings and log history for time spent online. To my shock I found I was averaging social media at 1h 45min a day and 2h 36min a day on you tube. !!!! So then I check the dates when I thought I really had been on social media for quite sometime while being idle, and to my shock I discovered the time was less than half of what I thought I had spent. So perceptions are faulty and non reliable. Human memory is faulty especially if driven based on emotions. A memory associated with an emotion is faster to recall and more intense, but that does not mean that it is accurate.
My perception was that when I had free time I would spend it online, yet interestingly I did not and was probably able to use my time for a more creative endeavor or doing something of value, and not online. Yet when I was not in “idle” mode I would carve out the time to spend online. So I decided to change that habit and see the results. I placed an alarm on my phone that would alert me if I would spend more than 30 minutes online on social media or You tube in total in a day. Results were surprising. Now that I had a self imposed alerting mechanism, I did not violate this time limit and in fact averaged even less !!
So no constant checking for postings or aimless video surfing. Managing to save a lot of time to do my high value goals. Time that was spent at any time surfing online has been converted to useful valuable resource. And so with the domino effect of time, I am now able to compress and utilize the time I would spend at night tackling my high value goals I can use to get some much needed sleep, ( I usually only sleep 4hours a day) and now i have increased it to at least 6-7hours on some days.
Time is an illusion and what you do with it is your choice. There is nothing wrong connecting and spending time online, there is a lot of value to that if you choose it. But what was more powerful for me was that my New year intention was to do even more of what I love to read, write, teach, research, learn, study, exercise, meditate and journal. Thank you universe to allowing to gain my first insight into making my intentions come true by gifting me the one most valuable yet scarce and abundant resource, TIME.
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I love you
