Over-leveraged Time

As society works down its overload of financial leverage, I am amazed by various experts advising a "back to basics" approach to life: saving (a little at a time); investing (cash first, then riskier markets); career (focus on doing your best at the job you have now); dressing (more formal business attire is coming back). I will be interested to see if a simpler approach to time management becomes similarly faddish.

I believe our time has become as overextended as our finances. For too long, busy-ness has been a badge of importance; leisure has been equated with lazy. As a result, we don't sleep enough, we degrade our work through multitasking, and we stress ourselves out trying to lots of things competently rather than focusing on a few things and doing them well. The result: life feels like a 24-hour race. The rat race.

I don't know how a time deleveraging might look. Will people begin working fewer hours? Seems doubtful when one is trying to avoid a layoff. Will volunteer hours suffer? Perhaps, though people may substitute time for cash donations to causes they really care about. Will TV watching decline? One can only hope.

For me, I've vowed to identify and try to stop the time wasters that eat out chunks of my day, often without me realizing it. Blog reading on esoteric subjects; long conversations about non-business matters with co-workers; endless trying of new productivity tools instead of actually being productive. None of these things is bad in and of itself, or as an occacional diversion. But I sometimes find that they become the point of my day, not a sideline to it.

Control them, and I'll have more time for the things I really want to do: talk with Sylvia, play with the kids, read, improve my golf game. I shouldn't feel I have to "borrow" time to do these things I love; by breaking my bad habits, I can make them the focus of how I spend my time. I will be the richer for it.