Good advice from my wife. The morning scenario is pretty classic for us. I enjoy getting up early, getting ready for the day, and then relaxing a little before having to head out the door. She prefers to do her relaxing on the front end in the bed. Neither way is wrong, we just do it differently. One Sunday morning while getting ready for church, we begin a discussion that is never effective. It consists of each of us attempting to convince the other why our way of waking up is the best.
Like I said, neither of us are ever convinced that the other is right on this particular issue. But the point she tends to make in these discussions is a good one: Don't let the clock run your life. Please make sure not to miss-quote me on this one. There are many benefits to being on time and many scenarios where being late will hurt more than it will help. Being on time shows your preparedness and professionalism as well. The contention here is that when people allow clocks and time to run their lives, they are not taking the time necessary to really enjoy life to its fullest.
How do I know that? Simple. People who run their days by the clock very rarely schedule down-time. The reason for this is because they believe that their time is far too valuable to be spent "goofing off" or "being lazy." While I do not condone laziness at all, time always needs to be taken to simply relax and enjoy life.
Being the type-A personality that I am, it is very easy for me to schedule every minute of my day with productivity. While my boss is thrilled with this aspect of my personality, it is not always beneficial. Why is that? How can I literally spend every waking minute doing something productive or beneficial and it not be a good thing? I asked the same thing. I realized that there were people who got less accomplished in a given day but were much more satisfied with the day they had.
I came to realize that the difference was in allowance for down-time. While my schedule was completely screwed up if something didn't go as planned, their's was just fine because of the time allotted for relaxation. My solution was to run my day by not really running it at all. Outside of work, my day is very rarely scheduled ahead of time. Whims and random road trips are acceptable now because there is no schedule that they are messing up. My only rule now is to focus on what really matters. If it is a question between blogging or randomly taking my wife to dinner...she wins every time. My relationship with her matters more to me than just about anything else in this world and that always comes first.
Make time for those little things that really matter by de-cluttering your schedule. Trust me. When you make time for the things that make a difference, everything else can wait. In a hundred years, people are probably not going to be counting the number of blog posts I have written, the amount of time spent playing the guitar, or the intensity of my workouts. They will only look back and have memories. Those are the things in which to really invest some time.
Stay classy,
Andrew
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