Ever find yourself filling time rather than spending it? You have a task to do and you have two hours to do it in, and you get it done in 2 hours. If you had 1.5 hours, that’s how long it would have taken… and if you had 2.5 hours you might get it done in just under 3. While that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I think it makes the point.
We recently hired a company to help us with tidying and organizing our garage and basement storage. We floundered over a couple weeks figuring out what to throw away and how to organize things. Then when we were getting help that was costing us more the longer it took, we transformed our garage. It went from a dumping ground that got out of hand when we had to throw everything in there for our main floor renovation, to a fully useable space with organized shelves and clear, labelled bins. We didn’t even need to add more shelving than what was already there.
If we had to keep going on our own without help, I think that we would still be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic – moving things around in a disorganized garage that still looked like a disaster.
That’s an example where outside help got us through what needed to be done, but some of this filling time issue is more personal. For example, I haven’t been getting my morning routine done every morning. Sometimes I get to my workout later in the day. When I’m not on summer break, I wake up at 5:15, I write, meditate, and work out and I’m usually in the shower by 7am or shortly thereafter. But now my writing could take an hour and I could head to the basement for a workout that’s usually 20 minutes cardio and 20-25 minutes of weights and stretching, and turn it into well over an hour. However, I’m not doing more, I’m just procrastinating and stretching the time. I’m distracted by my phone. I’m taking very long breaks between sets. I’m doing a 10 min cooldown on a 20 min ride on my stationary bike.
Sometimes I just stretch the time I spend on things just because the time is available. I’m not spending time doing things, I’m filling the time available. While it’s nice to have the time to be able to do this, it does feel like I’m just wasting time… and time is a limited resource. The question is, if I didn’t just use my ’empty’ time up, what would I spend it on?
