I’ve been thinking about time a lot lately. It’s a precious commodity that most of us take for granted.
Time is the most precious of commodities, given that we can never get it back once it’s used. Oh sure, we can maybe buy a bit more time through careful life choices like diet and exercise, but at some point, we all run out of it.
Eventually, Father Time gets his pound of flesh.
Maybe time deserves more focus than we give it?
Imagine, for one moment, that your time were a full pitcher of water.
Let me explain.
Let’s Pretend each day you start with a full pitcher of water (i.e., your time and attention), and many empty cups. Now imagine that throughout the day, you slowly empty your pitcher into many of these various cups, and by the day’s end, you’ve emptied all of the water (time and attention) from your pitcher.
What cups would you pour your water into? In other words, what would occupy most of your time and attention?
The cups represent all the time and attention you devote throughout your 17-hour day.
Work, social media, spouse, exercise, housework, television, parenting, your kids, anxiety and worry, regret, the future! Since we can’t pour water into multiple cups at once, each cup requires our full attention.
When you are thinking about work, you aren’t thinking about our family. When scrolling on social media, chances are we aren’t thinking about our spouse. It’s okay to admit it, we all do it – it’s easy to tell ourselves that we are effectively controlling our time, but are we really?
But here’s the rub on your time and attention - they don’t lie. Most people spend their entire lives constantly filling the same cups, oblivious to the impact on their existence. They spend days, weeks, months, and in some cases decades filling cups they never intended to fill, while neglecting those precious cups that needed our time and attention, but that never got filled.
How many times do we let the internet, more specifically social media, steal our attention? Why do we let others, that we don’t know, and will never know, and shouldn't care less about drain our emotional tank? Why do we let those people steal our time and attention?
It’s absolutely maddening to think of how much time is wasted every day, thinking, worrying, and responding to people that we don’t know and who shouldn’t have any relevance in validating our own moral compass.
Every day, we are given a precious gift of only 1,440 minutes. Wouldn’t you want to pour your water in cups that matter, like friends, family, and work, rather than pouring one single drop into a cup owned by some random idiot on social media?
The greatest thing about our pitcher is that we get to refill it every day. It represents another opportunity to pour the water into the right cups.
So, the next time a social media vigilante threatens to degrade your choices of which cups you pour your water into, you might just think to yourself – “It’s not worth my PRECIOUS time”.
Stay the course, my friends.