How to Protect and Focus Your Time

🚀 Everyone wants your attention – Issue #134

The rise of social media and the app economy have shifted the focus from your wallet to your time.

They know that if they own your attention, they’ll have more chances to get your money later anyway. They also know that if they dominate your time, publishers and advertisers will spend anything to be where you are.

Time is the new currency.

Staring at our phones

According to Nielsen, adults in the U.S. spend an average of 11 hours and 27 minutes per day consuming digital media. GlobalWebIndex’s report shows that an average of 2 hours and 23 minutes per day is spent on social networks and messaging.

I’m sure this varies a bit by age, geography, and occupation. But, I know that my social and work circles spend a lot more than 2 1/2 hours a day messaging on their devices (e.g., Slack, email, other messaging services).

To put all of this into perspective, imagine spending almost seven years of your life on social media. That’s the impact of the projected use of the typical services in your lifetime.

We all talk about the meaningful things we want to accomplish in our lives:

• We want to work out and be healthier.

• We want to spend more time with the people who matter the most to us.

• We want to travel to amazing places and create memories.

• We want to write that bestselling novel that we keep promising ourselves that we will publish someday.

• We want to escape the 9–5 grind at a reasonable point in our lives, and finally be able to do those things we always put on the back burner.

However, somehow we end up scrolling through our favorite social feeds, and we put it all off for another day. Netflix, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat eat up our free time.

We probably know this, given how we spend our days with our phones in our hands. But, we probably don’t realize how much this adds up month after month, and over the years.

Trading our time for money

So, while companies are lining up to spend money to be where you spend your time, your employer is also convincing you to trade your time for money.

Essentially, that’s what we do as employees. We give up our time, which actually represents slices of our life, in return for money.

Tim Urban of Wait But Why created this excellent visualization of how the average American spends their life in weeks. It is somewhat sobering to mark off the boxes of your life like this.

You realize what a scarce and precious resource you are giving away with your daily decisions. You dedicate the lion’s share of those little boxes to your career. Now, you may understand why I have committed my life to help people make the most of that big red section.

Spending your life

When you spend the money that you receive for your time, you are essentially buying something with your life. I don’t think we often visualize it that way, but that’s what we’re doing. 

We trade our life for things.

For example:

• The median household income in the U.S. in 2018 was $61,937.

• The average new car price in 2018 was $37,577.

These numbers mean that the average household will have to spend more than 60% of its annual income to buy a new car. Do people do that? Yes, of course, they do.

Over 17 million vehicles were purchased just in the U.S. in 2019. But, the reality is that this probably isn’t a cash transaction. It will be a loan, which means that the car will end up costing even more.

Now, assume that someone works 8 hour days for 50 weeks of the year to earn their total income (accounting for the average ten days of vacation time). That means that they spent roughly 1,200 hours of their life working for the money to buy that car.

Imagine carving 150 days of work out of the precious remaining time in your life to buy a new car!

But, that also doesn’t account for the time spent commuting to work and back. I’ll be kind and only assume a half-hour drive to work (I wish!), so the purchaser really spent 1,350 hours of life to afford that car.

Those hours are the equivalent of 56 days of life energy.

I’m not a full-fledged minimalist yet. But, over the past decade, I’ve started thinking a lot harder about what I buy.

Being an independent business owner is part of this revelation. You do think a lot more deeply about how money flows in and out of your business. You need to treat your career as a business, whether you are an entrepreneur or not.

However, now I think about the remaining “boxes” of my life that I must trade to receive money. Is a new purchase really worth the precious time remaining in my short life? 

Is a material possession worth more than reinvesting to buy back my freedom? Does a retailer or manufacturer deserve my money more than my children do?

My time and energy are too precious to spend without thinking more deeply than I used to about such things. Since my money is often the outcome of trading my time and energy, it is almost as precious.

There are more critical things that I want to accomplish in the time that remains in my life. We all have amazing things that we can bring to this world if we can eliminate distractions.

It is essential that you fiercely protect your time and focus your remaining energy if you want to achieve the big goals in your life before all of the meaningless little demands chew them up.

Defend and focus

You may have already realized that you would rather spend your precious time accomplishing great things. That’s fantastic!

However — if you’re anything like me — you come up with dozens of exciting ideas, and you want to tackle them all. It’s tempting to have a massive list of ambitious to-do items.

However, nothing slows you down more than spreading your attention and energy too thin. We all think that we can multitask and accomplish more in less time. It makes us feel good to be so productive.

But, the reality is that human beings fail at successfully dividing our attention. Not only are we poor multi-taskers, but we also tend to get stuck in a rut of doing and being busy without really thinking about the “why.”

What is the point of rushing only to arrive at the wrong destination?

A lack of clear purpose, vague goals, and diffusion of effort lead to rapid progress towards a meaningless destination or a slower march towards a goal that truly matters.

Defending your precious time, energy, and resources is only the first step. The next critical step is to take your valuable pool of resources and tightly focus them on accomplishing a singular objective.

Of course, we will have numerous tasks and smaller goals that have to be accomplished in our lives each year. That’s normal, and it’s the price we pay to be someone who wants some semblance of a reasonable lifestyle. Most of us aren’t willing to seclude ourselves in a mountain cabin and refuse to leave until we complete our great novel.

However, you should strictly prioritize your tasks and goals so that one rises to the top above the others and becomes your north star.

• What is the single essential thing that you want to accomplish before the end of the year?

• How can you align your daily activities to support that?

• How will you fiercely protect the time required every day and every week to ensure success?

There are few things more powerful than a focused person with an intense drive to achieve a singular goal.

Use your calendar to dedicate time and protect it for the things that matter. I block off time on my schedule for the things that I know I need to be productive. That includes writing, regular exercise, breaks to recharge, time in nature, dinner with my family, and a reasonable amount of sleep.

As a multipotentialite, I know how easily I can be distracted. I know that I could let a multitude of small tasks and activities eat away at my day.

I’ve experienced this many times in my own life. It’s easy to get into what I like to call a “spinning plates” state.

A bunch of tasks and responsibilities demand a little bit of your attention; otherwise, they come crashing down. So you rush around trying to keep each plate happily spinning, but you’re not achieving anything meaningful.

It requires saying “No” to other people. But, it also requires saying no to yourself and letting some things go. Some of your projects have to be shelved, no matter how much you love them.

As I mentioned above, I use scheduled appointments on my daily calendar to maintain focus. But, my daily journal is another technique that helps me focus my energy on the few things that matter each day.

Every night, I write down three tasks that I want to focus on and accomplish the next day. When I wake up in the morning, I review those tasks and clear my mind of anything else that tries to intrude.

I keep a list in Evernote to capture ideas, article concepts, or other tasks when they pop into my head. I jot them down but immediately go back to the big three for the day (no matter how tempting it is to squeeze in some new little thing).

“We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. Meanwhile, idiots focus on marginal productivity hacks and gains while they leak out energy each passing day.” — Ryan Holiday

Once you become very clear with your north star goal and your overall purpose, you can focus all of your time and energy on achieving it. As Tim Urban’s visualization makes abundantly clear, we have fewer life boxes left than we think.

Be ruthless in your decision making around those boxes. Who and what deserves to claim one and fill it in each day? That is not a decision that you should place in someone else’s hands.

Your time is your most precious resource, and only you should decide how it gets spent.

Quick Tip – Audit your time

One of the first steps you can take to reclaim your time is to track how you spend it. We often think that we know how we spend our time every day. But, many people are surprised by the details when they keep a time journal.

Track everything for at least a week or two:

• Your sleep

• Morning rituals (e.g., shower, breakfast, watching the news)

• Exercise

• Commute times

• How you spend all of your time at work

• Breaks and recreation

• Lunch and dinner

• Evening activities (e.g., reading, Netflix, social media)

Many of us work and play on our digital devices, and some tools can help with this time tracking. iOS “Screen Time” and Android’s “Digital Wellbeing” provide useful reports of how much time you’re spending on your mobile devices. You can see the daily average, plus a history of your daily and weekly trends.

You can also review the time spent by category (e.g., social networking, productivity, creativity) and by specific apps (e.g., Instagram, Slack, Twitter). It might be eye-opening for you.

I know that I tend to spend too much time on Instagram, for example. Checking the report each week reminds me to dial it down.

Once you know how you are spending the 24 hours of your day, you can then decide the best ways to allocate that time. Invest your time in things that are important to you. Take time back from activities that don’t deserve it.

Companies Offering Remote Jobs

• SmugMug helps photographers at all levels create beautiful online “homes” to protect, share, and sell their photos. They only have a few remote positions available, but one is for their CFO!

• Ballotpedia believes the world would be a better place if every voter cast an informed vote in every election in which he or she is eligible to vote. They have a couple of remote positions.

• Moodle is the world’s open-source learning platform that allows educators to create a private space online and easily build courses and activities with flexible software tools for collaborative online learning. They have a few remote positions where you need to live in the posted time zone.

🎁 Do you have a friend or coworker who might benefit from better time management?