Where Does the Time Go?

If you’re anything like me, you sometimes (or oftentimes) wake up from a smart phone induced coma and realize an hour or 3 have been sucked into the vacuum of your phone.

(I checked my iPhone 3 times responding to texts while writing that last sentence)

Is that all bad, though?

Not necessarily.

Not all of the time I spend on my phone is wasted staring at people doing cooler things than me on social media or looking at things I don’t need to buy on Amazon Marketplace.

Often, the phone, laptop, and tablet are productive tools that help connect me with the people I care most about.

However, the feeling of loosing control of your schedule and getting easily derailed by distraction can lead to hopelessness.

A few months ago I started to feel hopeless.

Then I stumbled on the work of man named Peter Drucker.

In his (deceivingly) esoterically titled book “The Effective Executive”, Peter talks about the problem of time management and counter-intuitively says that the first step for improving your productivity in work has less to do with trying to organize yourself or waste less time, but rather:

Drucker suggests tracking every hour of every day for 2

consecutive weeks WITHOUT trying to change anything

about your schedule.

So I thought I’d try the Drucker method out….

I used an app called Timeular (not a sponsor) to create multiple time-slot categories like “mealtime”, “creative work”, “email”, “shopping” etc.

I did the best I could to track every hour of the day for two weeks.

Here was the surprising result:

Within the first day of tracking time, I noticed something… Just the act of recording time, gave me a swift kick in the subconscious.

I couldn’t help but improve focus time on enduring projects, just so I didn’t have to look at a bad “time report card” at the end of the day.

It was as though my brain was trying to prove to itself that I wasn’t a time-wasting sloth.

Which led me to the believe that

“When one records where their time is spent, without trying to

change specific activities, it tricks the subconscious

brain into believing that it has even more agency

over wasted time.“

This was especially helpful to me, since I was (and still am) self-employed and have no one telling me what to do on a daily basis.

Another thing the experiment did was show me that I had no idea where I was spending my time.

As a full time artist, I thought the majority of my work day would be spent making art.

I was wrong…

Most of my work day was spent responding to email, interacting with clients over the phone, running to the post office, looking at social media (without posting), and other non-creative tasks.

I spent a measly handful of hours each week actually making art!

I was appalled.

How was I supposed to become a better artist if I averaged a couple of hours a day or less making art!

This led me to ask myself, why? Why wasn’t I spending more time making art?

Had I fallen out of love with creating?

Was I inherently lazy? (probably)

Or was time just escaping from under my feet?

These questions inspired me to embark on a journey and to begin asking myself this question:

“ Do my seconds, minutes, hours, and days, prove my desire to create

new things that make the world a better place to live in.”

This two week experiment forced me to reckon with myself and face that I am the sum total of my actions. It also forced me to stop for a moment, observe my life on paper, and realize that my life is going to fade away and the only things I will leave behind are meaningful connections with people I love and my creative work.

“Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives.”

-Henry David Thoreau

Go and track your activities for a week or two.

It might shock you to know where you are spending your life.

-Alec