10 Tricks for Finding Time

Life hacking your life back.

When did the lazy days of watching clouds drift by disappear? When did our values change from experiencing life to accomplishing it? We are, as a society, obsessed with achievement. Hard work. Increasing productivity. Getting shit done. Side hustles. Yet no one ever has enough time.

It makes sense, since there are hundreds of thousands of ways you could spend all your time. Watching videos, pursuing hobbies, reading, traveling, making crafts, reading/watching the news, binging Netflix, diving down wiki holes, making love, cuddling with your pets, reading to your children/grandchildren, cooking, dieting, working out, volunteering, studying, sleeping, drinking, writing, spending time with friends, gardening, learning a new skill.

Each of us crafts our own schedule. Depending on your job, your amount of flexibility may vary dramatically, but even those of us that work the longest hours still make a lot of choices about how we spend our time.

It doesn’t feel that way. Instead, it feels that there’s never enough time in the day. Our perspective is to blame, not the actual number of minutes in the day. Today, things move so very fast. Cars, planes, trains, our own two feet and our overall lives move at a more frenzied pace then ever before. We are bombarded every moment with sounds and sights and movement. There are trillions of Tweets, over a billion websites, thousands of news stations. Our brain tunes out 99% of what it is pummeled with, but that is not nearly for today’s amount of stimulation.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her autobiography that, in her mother’s time, life was slow, steady, and one pursued the same activities day after day, year after year, with a feeling of tranquility and permanence. She felt that in her own time, the world moved so much faster. That the newest thing one day, was the established norm only two years later. She died in 1960, and the world has continued to grow exponentially faster still since this observation.

Our natural reaction to having more options is to take on more activities. Work harder, longer. But this is where our perspective of wanting to take advantage of all of these opportunities doesn’t serve us. Every time we take on a new commitment or additional opportunity, we need to run that much faster and be that much more efficient simply to not lose ground to chaos.

We begin at a very young age to learn this value that “more is most certainly more”. Later, we are pushed to do as much possible to get into a good college — volunteer, get good grades, participate in loads of clubs, sports, and activities to fill out our school application.

Instead, what if we think about our schedule like a favorite room. One we want to keep a safe haven — lovely, simple, and tidy. Put conscious thought into what we want in the room, things that make us feel good and bring us energy, and clean out the rest.

Stress is inevitable today, and yet one of the biggest risks to our happiness and health. I recognize that being an entrepreneur and a mother, I actively choose to take on an incredible amount of stress. Being the CEO of a growing company, managing 60,000 ft.² of commercial real estate, thousands of customers, and dozens of employees, means that there is always something urgent that requires my attention. Besides getting enough sleep and making sure that I have a mug of tea by my side, I also take a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) called Cymbalta, that is an anti-anxiety pill as well as an antidepressant. This is not something I really like, and would rather not be tied to chemicals, but I recognize that it, along with all of these other self-supportive habits, allows me to live a much larger and yet less stressed life that I would otherwise.

I hope you can take a few minutes and think about how to simplify your own life. There’s so much to be said for tranquility. Yet we rarely hear that word. I believe it is the answer to today’s overstimulation and frenzy, and that even in this crazy world of 2018, we can each be truly balanced and peaceful. It is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves and the world, and leads to our greatest contributions to society.

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