You’re choosing to do that? How we invest our time, emotions and attention.
Attention is our most precious gift. It is our tool, our weapon, and our controller. We create our lives through what we attend to (i.e., pay attention to). It is the substance of our feelings, thoughts, decisions, and actions.
Most Americans spend our time in similar ways. Many of these decisions move us away from our goals, and knock us Off Our Game. Simple changes can help us achieve more. One example is described below.
(This blog is excerpted from Marcy’s book, On Your Game!)
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When it comes to deciding what to do in any given moment, three things come into play: emotions, decisions, and actions. For now let’s focus on decisions and actions.
Most Americans decide to spend our time in similar ways. We spend 41% of our lives staring at screens. (footnote 128) This is an astounding portion. Even if we assume half of this is for work, that’s still 20 percent, or one out of every five minutes of our non-work lives, looking at a screen – and likely – sedentary. Is this helping us achieve our goals? For argument’s sake, let’s assume it is. So, let’s dive in further. We’ll remove laptops and phones that can justifiably be used for all sorts of goal-oriented activities and will home in on other, less productivity-focused, screens.
Now then, the average American between ages eighteen and sixty-five spends between two and a half, and almost four hours, EACH DAY watching TV (footnote 129). This is probably not meaningful, goal oriented time. It could, however, be part of the ever-so-helpful rest and rejuvenation that we all know is needed to stay On Our Game. But even then, two and a half to four hours each day? Let’s look at this statistic against the backdrop of our limited and ever-so-precious “free time.”
To put it in perspective, if we invest ten hours in sleep/personal care, and approximately seven hours per day working, we have seven hours remaining each day. Four hours of TV is almost 60 percent of that discretionary time, and almost 100 percent of our flexible time, once commuting (two hours on average) and cooking/eating (two hours on average,) are considered.
Mull that over. Almost 100 percent of our discretionary time is invested—not in pursuing our hobbies/interests/goals or socializing—but in passive TV watching.
Thinking more about those seven hours of “non-work time,” they can be invested in an expansive set of potential activities. Practically speaking, they could be invested in the commonplace—commuting, cooking/eating, exercising, socializing, helping family/friends, relaxing outdoors or with a book or game—or they could be invested the exceptional: hang gliding, kayaking, filmmaking, glass blowing, music writing, terrarium making, flash mob inciting, or politicking. Seems enticing indeed. Yet, four of these seven discretionary hours (for an average American) are invested in sitting in front of a television. This seems like an off-game decision.
That’s right. Our Current State Time Allocation looks a lot like a support structure (dare I say “cheering squad”) for the Busyness-Achievement Loop and Profession Versus Passion Loop we reviewed in Chapter 2. And it’s the reality for the average American. Perhaps it explains some of why 80% of respondents in my study say they’re off their game.
We are not carefully thinking through how we’re spending our time. We are not sustaining focus on our long- and short-term goals. Instead, as the Busyness-Achievement Loop explains, our decisions are more driven by momentary whims, and less by thoughtful planning.
If we are to achieve more, we must be disciplined in our decisions and actions. First we need to take stock of them, and then make sensible choices about what change is needed.
The key questions are:What are we investing our precious discretionary time doing?
How well are these choices setting us up to achieve our goals?
What adjustments should we make to achieve more?
