Do you know how much money you have? You know, that thing you spend a bunch of just to live? You...
Rocks, Pebbles, Sand
If you're not familiar with the idea of Rocks, Pebbles, and Sand for prioritizing your life, there are tons of posts about it if you Google it and this is a good, succinct version: https://mindfulpractices.us/2020/06/16/prioritizing-your-life-rocks-pebbles-sand/.
In short, the idea is that you need to prioritize the most important parts of your life (rocks), then the middle priority parts (pebbles), and let the rest be the sand that fills your days. This is fine for a Sit Down and Make My Big Life Plan session and can help you prioritize what is important to you, but when it comes to actually planning your time, the exact opposite is true.
In your day-to-day life, as you plan out each week, some of the most insignificant "life sand" turns out to be your immovable rocks. Things like sleep and "work" (which could be school, homemaking, caretaking, etc.) take up the majority of your time, yet are not the things you're really living for.
Except, maybe, sleep. Sleep is awesome.
Using some basic values, 40 hours of work and 8 hours of sleep per night is 94 out of 168 hours of the week - 56%! (I promise to keep the math to a minimum, but this is important). So, right off the bat, you're spending more than half of your time on a couple of things that most life planners would call insignificant.
Next, you have the pebbles of your time - grocery shopping, laundry, church, the gym, and whatnot - consuming several more hours weekly. These aren't bad things or wastes of time; they are just part of the business of life.
Lastly, you have your sand. This is the minutes and hours outside of the business of living where you actually get to choose how you spend your time. Depending on your situation, you may have a lot of sand or a few precious grains.
The two questions to ask yourself are:
- Do you know how much "extra" time you have?
- Are you choosing what you do with it?
We built Slaytime to help answer those questions. Not so you fill every minute of every day, but to help you make the most of the time you control. In the coming posts, we'll help you learn how to think about your time, which is really a way of thinking about your life. You have the time you need - I promise - it's just scattered around as sand that's hard to see.
Until next time, slay!
