9/23/2017–What would a day look like if it were designed like the life you wanted, and fit to-scale at 24 hours?
I’d like to spend one day as though it were a representation of how I wanted my whole life to be spent. Not necessarily in chronological order, but just a 24-hr block of activities that reflect the proportion of time spent on each “thing”. It might be a good way to learn how to prioritize better or what assumptions I’m making that should be questioned. It seems like a common thing to be able to say, “I want to do this with my life”. Similarly, “Before I die…” boards have popped up recently and touch a part of us that both desires to meaningfully contribute but also to procrastinate. So, if you’ve got an idea of something that you want to accomplish, or even a way you’d like to live, it seems like it might be a helpful exercise to spend 24 hours as if they were your whole life. At the end of the day, you might get a glimpse of what the life you think you want actually feels like.
Purpose: figure out how to spend my time
Method: Identify my purpose, the activities that support it, and the proportion of time that might be spent on each. Then live one day following that schedule and answer the question, “where should I spend more/less time”?
This “life in a day” would have to be tailored to your current resources and environment. For example, if you want to travel to 50 countries before you die, maybe it’s worth reflecting on why that’s important to you. What would that amount of travel provide or allow? New foods? Culture? Language?Once you have an idea of the benefit you expect from travel, seek to taste that same principle within the confines of a day in your current location. If it’s food you like, you might find and sample a few local ethnic restaurants but really take your time to enjoy the food as you would while abroad. If you’re attracted to the history or culture that travelling teaches, you might take an hour to study major historic events of your target countries (I wonder how future travel would benefit from doing this). If it’s meeting diverse people, you could look for ways to speak to people from various countries within your community or online. The point isn’t to experience something close to the real thing, rather at the end of the day you’ll have felt what spending a portion of your limited time on certain topics might be like.
Considering what I want to do before I die, my life in a day would have to align to my purpose to enable people’s health, entertainment, and employment. I would want to counsel someone on some matter of health–maybe a family member or close friend (seems most efficient to reach people I’m already close to). I’d like to play music for people. That’s easy enough considering I could walk outside and play on the street. No compensation needed, though I wouldn’t consider it against my purpose to be paid. I’d also want to counsel someone seeking a job. This could easily be done over the phone, online, or even in-person. There are always people looking for a job in a city of any reasonable size, right?
Finally, my life in a day would need to reflect the necessity to enable myself. This means making money, learning, keeping myself spiritually and physically healthy, entertained, and in good-standing with my relationships. It would need to be a workday, but adjusted for the hours a weekend provides. So, at 9 hours/day that’s about 6.42 out of every 24 hours that I work. With 8 hours in bed (sleep time plus snoozing/falling asleep), that leaves about 9.5 hours in my day to do non-work activities. This creates an interesting question–is work necessarily separate from the activities that are “what you want to do with your life”? Before addressing that, first let’s figure out how we’ll account for eating.
I’d of course need to eat, which takes up time but it’s hard to calculate. If I count time eating with people as time spent “maintaining relationships”, I’d include it in that activity’s allotment of time. If I’m saying “eating” is itself a use of time, I would want to reflect only the time that is dedicated only to eating. This is about 30 minutes of every day, including prep and travel (even when I end up eating with other people). The book Never Eat Alone does a great job of explaining the value of shared meals, so maybe this is one good lesson from this exercise. That is, don’t spend time just eating; kill two birds with one stone by adding food to activities that you’d otherwise do anyway. For this life in a day exercise, it frees us up to apportion zero minutes to eating. Even travel time would be covered by the travel time associated with the activities done while eating. For example, if I’m going to spend one hour with friends and I’d put 5 minutes of my day toward travelling to wherever they are, that 5 minutes of travel time doubles as the travel time required to eat at that same activity. So my day may not include any time dedicated to “eating” specifically.
Back to the question of work; is it feasible to work only in a way that supports my overall goal? I’m in the camp that says “follow your passion” isn’t necessarily sustainable advice (see: fund your passion). So in my 24 hour version of life, how many hours would be spent on “work” only, rather than an area of interest for which I happen to be paid? With 7 hours spent working a job–I’ll round from 6.42 to 7 to account for time working in the restaurant industry–it would benefit my purpose significantly if I could figure out how to get paid for achieving it. The choice does seem to lie with me, but the important factors on which to decide aren’t clear. Where’s the optimal balance between the amount of salary I need and the amount of time spent on my purpose? Doesn’t it kind of depend on what jobs are within my reach? For example, say I have these two options (among others):
1). I’m offered a salary of $1 million working 7 hours a day on non-purposeful work.
2). I’m also offered $50,000 to work a job that aligns directly with my purpose.
Option 1 might allow a day that, while 7 hours is taken from my life purpose, a significant amount of another major resource (cash) exists. If my purpose is one which benefits from that particular extra cash, maybe it’s worth it to work for $1 million, even though my work is totally detached from what matters most. What purpose is fueled by cash? I’ll avoid calling any purpose more noble than another, but these might be acquiring financial wealth, having “nice things”, travelling in comfort, hosting and caring for others, or investing in businesses.
Option 2, however, would be the way to go for a purpose which is less expensive to fund, and rather is fueled by time. What purpose is like this? Maybe it’s something more talent-based. In my experience, time spent practicing art, music, sport, or entertainment seems to be what helps most in those fields, rather than dollars spent on equipment, coaching, etc. When it comes to talent, time is a much more efficient fuel than cash.
My purpose is to enable others’ entertainment, health, and employment. I don’t money as much as I need time to enable entertainment (as a musician). I can enable the health of others by learning, then teaching. Teaching could take the form of all sorts of communication: writing, speaking, being a professor, researching, or running a restaurant. Other than research, none of these jump out to me as particularly high-cost activities. Finally, If my purpose is to enable employment, I may actually benefit from having a lot of money. I could take some time and put it toward work so that I have enough cash to directly employ people. Otherwise, I might choose to spend more of my time working to coach job seekers, which would not be a source of significant income, but would benefit greatly from all the time I can give it.
There’s a third “fuel” on which a purpose can run: people. No, that doesn’t mean standing on a pile of people to reach your own lofty goals. Rather, Jesus kind of had a people-fueled purpose. Spreading the good word didn’t require a lot of money nor time to spread. But the fuel is people; word-of-mouth, the oldest and most-effective form of advertisement. All ideas can be spread this way, so anyone with an ideology-driven purpose needs this resource more than time or money (maybe time to form it, but part of me thinks most of these types would choose popularity over perfection of their ideas).
My ideal “life in a day”
Bed: 8 hours (33% of my life)
Read, reflect, and relax: 3.5 hours (15%)
Enable health: 3 hours (12%)
Enable entertainment: 3 hours (12%)
Enable employment: 3 hours (12%)
Non-purposeful work: 0 hours (or 7 if necessary for money. These 7 hours would be taken from the four bigger non-sleep buckets equally)
Relationships: 2 hours (8%)
Transportation: 1 hour (4%)
Exercise: 1 hour (4%)
Instantly, it’s clear that any combination of activities increases the overall value of my day. That’s the caveat to “fund your passion” and why “follow your passion” isn’t completely unhelpful advice. Without purposeful combination of activities, though, it’s clear that we’re limiting our ability to live how we believe we should. That’s the Archimedes lever of purposeful living: combining activities where appropriate.