Being Deliberate, Pt. 1

One of the fundamentals of Present Tense Living is being deliberate about what you do. Being deliberate means that, to the greatest extent possible, you decide on what and with whom you are going to spend your limited time and attention. You do not let the culture or your peers decide; you decide.

Now it is unavoidable that some of our time has to be spent on activities that we may not choose to do. Most of us have to work for a living, and perhaps we work at something we wouldn't choose to do if we weren't paid to do it. Or, even if you find meaning in your work, all jobs involve some activities that are mundane or downright boring. (I call this administrivia.) This is true not just at work: if you are a parent, there are certain activities (like sitting through sports practices) that no sane person would choose to spend so much time on but which are part of the deal of having kids.

But sometimes we get swept up in what is popular and find that most of our time is spent doing stuff that "everybody" does but that isn't really meaningful to us. Not that these activities aren't fun, but they add up to more than our available time, so we find ourselves being "so busy" yet not accomplishing anything meaningful. Have you ever heard anyone say (or said yourself) "I'm on the go all the time but I never seem to get anything done."? Much of the rat race consists of doing/buying/giving attention to things merely because everyone else in our social or professional circle is doing them. This habit of keeping up with the Joneses with our time is easy to understand--we don't want to seem "different"--and difficult to break.

There are two ways to start being deliberate about your life: bottoms-up or top-down. The bottoms-up way begins with writing down every single thing you do. You could get really detailed and keep a time journal for a week or two, accounting for every hour of your day. But at a minimum, sit down and list on a sheet of paper each activity you do, both at home and outside the home, both for yourself and for others. Be as thorough as you can.

Once your list is complete, check off the things that you must do--work, commute, pick up the kids at school, make dinner for the family, etc. There are probably ways to minimize the time spent on these things, but for now we'll leave them alone and just accept that we have to do them.

Next, look at the unchecked items on your list. Before you do anything else, add to the list things that are missing: the activities you wish you had time for, but somehow never do. Now, thinking carefully about your goals, dreams, talents, and desires, rank the things on your list in order of importance to you. What do you want to spend your time on? To what do you want to direct your attention? Rank them in order of importance/interest to you. You may even want to cross some completely off the list; things you no longer want to do.

You can probably see where this is going. Once you have that list in order of priority, it is just a matter of being deliberate about making time for your important activities. You allot time first to the things you have to do, then make sure your high-priority items get some time in your day or week. After that, if you have time left, you can work in the lower-priority items, or just drop them all together.

In the next post we'll look at the top-down method for accomplishing the same thing. But the point of both methods is the same: to ensure that we are not spending our time on activities that we really don't care about, that are just a form of competition and keeping up that are every bit as prideful as spending our money on things we don't care about just to maintain appearances. In both cases, we are ceding control of our lives--whether money or time--to the culture around us. That's no way to live!