Never waste your time

In this third part in a series on our relationship to time, we want to address the idea of “wasting time”. 

It’s likely that you see your time as precious, especially if you’re a busy executive. If you think that what you value has lost value—you’re kept waiting by others, or you’re in a meeting where the presenter is telling you something you already know and you could be doing something more valuable—it’s likely you’ll think “this is a waste of my time!”. It’s a way of thinking that gives rise to a lot of upset, anger, and blame. But as we shared in part one of the series, time is not an external resource that you can store, save, or waste as such. 

So what exactly are you wasting when you waste your time? 

Our answer to that is, your love. 

Everything, in other words, that is present in you when you express yourself from a context of loving what you are doing, from vitality and enthusiasm to curiosity and creativity.

As an exercise right now, reflect on what you love doing. Do you love having lunch with your friends, or playing golf with your buddies? Do you love negotiating a big deal, or getting into a lively debate? Do you love strolling along the beach, or playing hide-and-seek with your kids? 

Whatever it is you love doing, when you think about your time doing what you love, do you consider it wasted time? Is it ever a waste of time to do what you love doing? We’d wager not. And that experience of loving what you are doing is time-less. It’s a state of being fully absorbed and engaged, so that you actually lose track of time. 

So for us to think we are wasting our time, we must have stopped loving what we are doing. 

We must think there’s something better we could be doing or should be doing, somewhere else we would rather be than where we are, something else we would rather be feeling than what we are feeling right now. Notice that all of this thinking involves not being where we are, and not doing what we are actually doing.

This is a habit of mind, and like any habit, we can change it. The particular challenge of this habit is that it is predicated on a belief that the thing we’re doing is the cause of our interest and engagement. We think we enjoy fishing because fishing is enjoyable. We think we waste our time in a meeting because the meeting is dull. 

Consider that in fact, we have this the wrong way around. For some people, fishing is dull. For others, the same dull meeting to them would be interesting. We are the cause of our love, not the thing we’re doing. Which means only we are capable of wasting our time. 

This is not a proposal to pretend to love doing something (a “grin and bear it” paradigm). Nor is it a proposal to put up with doing something you clearly don’t love. There are obviously challenging dynamics of status and circumstance to deal with. Our point here is to challenge the belief that you have no choice but to think and feel the way you habitually do, and to work yourself into a state of frustration or helplessness. 

What if, instead of thinking you are wasting your time, you stop to consider that you have stopped loving—and then to ask yourself why. How did you get here? What are you angry about? What habits are you bringing to bear that are producing “wasted time”? (For example, for some people, it’s that they are afraid to decline a meeting or to interrupt a speaker who is going off topic). What are you not expressing, that if you expressed, would bring you back to the present? If you were curious again, what would you notice that you haven’t been noticing? These are the kinds of questions that if addressed, can change your life and your leadership of others for the better—and can be a lot more useful than to simply find fault with yourself and others for wasted time.

To never wasting your time, 

Tom and Team