Twenty-four hours. One thousand, four hundred, forty minutes. That is how much time each of us gets each and every day to make things happen. Multiply that times seven to get one hundred sixty-eight — 168 — hours in a week. So why don’t we all have enough time?
I heard someone say today that someone else doesn’t have time to do something that’s important. I just looked at her and asked, “Why not? She has the same twenty-four hours in the day as the rest of us.” Once one of my students came to me with the excuse of “I didn’t have time to get my work done.” I asked her if she’d had time to play with a friend, to which she answered in the affirmative. I told her, “If you had time to play, you had time to get your work done.”
Sometimes, there just doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day. I get it. I go through those days, too. They usually happen right around the time of big events, so they’re not everyday occurrences. Some days, the craziness and crammed up days are scheduled. When I wake up, I know that’s ahead of me. Nothing else will fit in those days, and as it is, 1:00 a.m. sees me still working, still pushing through the last little bit of work before I crash in exhausted slumber.
Then there are the other days. You know the ones I mean. You get up and get things done. At the end of the day, you have an extra thirty minutes or even an hour or two to focus on that something else that may be important. In my days, my work day often starts when our school day ends, so I could conceivably be “on” as mom and teacher for eleven hours then turn around and snag an extra hour or two of work before bed. When it comes to that time I have to be productive, that time I must use and finesse for the sake of efficiency, I have a choice: I can buckle down and get my work done, or I can piddle away the time chatting with friends, cruising social media, or playing games.
Then there are weekends. It is quite common for me to use Saturdays as make-up days. Sundays, too, if I absolutely must, but I try to keep sabbath on Sundays. When I have important priorities, like taking courses, working, or catching up on things for the house, then those take precedence over every thing else. When that writing course or that online class on publishing will help me advance my career and ultimately benefit my family as a result, then forget fun! I don’t mind being anhedonic for the short-term when there is so much delight on the other side long-term. After all, I only have 168 days a week to get that week’s tasks done, so I better prioritize my time because once it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no getting it back.
This is the opportunity cost of time. It’s just like with money. If you have a task that needs to get done, and you need to spend five hours a week completing it, then you have budgeted that five hours for that task. If you then burn part or all of that time in talking to friends, playing games, or running all over town for fun, then you don’t get those five hours back. They’re gone. *poof* Disappeared.
I no longer hear “I don’t have time” from myself or anyone else. We have time. We just have to decide how we’re going to invest our time. Often, if we have less fun with our time now, we’ll have the time and money to have more fun with our time later. It’s a simple concept: Work first, play later.
