As I started driving home from work today, something occurred to me that I had overlooked, or just failed to acknowledge earlier. I have had a several "reflective" moments in the last few weeks which have provided me deeper insight into my behaviors and experience. Some of it has been negative, some positive, but it doesn't really matter which, because all of it has helped in some way.
The thought today was on what I do with my free time, which is write. But it isn't just writing, it is creativity in general, or at the very least, activity. What I realized is that at the periods where I see my time is limited due to workload, I fallback to doing something active with my free time. Over the last years, that has definitely been mostly writing, but even before Hive, when "stressed" I would use the limited space to do something, whether it be clean the house, or head out with friends for a coffee. It was never to sit down in front of the TV for an hour.
However, when I had periods of low workload and plenty of free time, I became less active and therefore, less creative. Rather than proactively adding value to my life in some way, I became passive and would sit and play games on the PC or watch shows and movies. The more "bored" I became, the more passive content I consumed and most likely, the lower the quality of what I was consuming.
I remember back at university, reality television was just getting into the early swing, but it was taking off fast. A couple years later, there was a study done on how much reality television different socio-economic classes consumed, where the bottom earners spent tens of hours a week watching (just reality shows) and the top earners spent effectively zero. If I remember correctly, at the top, very little TV was consumed at all.
For a long time I have believed that the more we consume, the less creative we become, and I have at least through my own experience observed this in the people around me - and especially in myself. And, I wonder how much of creativity is actually driven by "not enough time" to consume, so actively doing things leads to skill development and discovery that increases the chance to earn. If necessity is the mother of invention, then the acute awareness of scarce time availability puts conscious attention on using time resources effectively.
And when there are multiple things to do that don't all fit into the time available, prioritization has to take place, which means ranking the order. For example, if I have the space to write and have an idea in mind, even if I haven't answered the comments from my previous post, I will write a new post first. The reason is, that I know about how long it takes me to write a post normally, and I also know how long I can spend on comments, so if I start with the comments, I will not be able to finish the post. However, if I finish the post first, I might have time to reply to a few comments and then, find smaller windows of space later for the rest.
This is a type of efficiency, but there is more to it than that too, as writing posts is also part of my mental health plan and it clears my head and energizes me, rather than makes me tired and not wanting to write. Writing first makes me more effective and likely increases my own engagement with the comments I get from you guys. However, even though I take comments seriously, I find I am also struggling at times to keep up with everything, so I skip some comments that I feel aren't an effective use of my time.
The most effective thing I can do with my time in my opinion is create something I value. And likely, the least effective use is to consume something that doesn't help me develop my various skills. Some people like to consume a lot because they think knowing stuff has value, but knowing actually doesn't, if it isn't applied practically - it is useless. This is even more so the case now, where information is readily available at our fingertips, but what is missing in most people is the skill to apply it well to generate value.
And, over the last years I have become increasingly busy, yet also increasingly productive and far more creative. The busier I get, the more efficient I become at using the time effectively, giving me a little more scarce space to fill with a little more creation. There is obviously a tap-out point where no more can be done healthily, but if paying attention, the equilibrium can be found.
With so many of us citing "no time" to do the things we want to do, perhaps we would create ways to have more time if we just did more in general, rather than spending it in downtime. Or perhaps more accurately, maybe if we reframed what "leisure time" meant and what qualifies, we would likely find that we feel better in general when we use the free time we have, to generate value. Afterall, using free time to create value is like using someone else's money to invest, it is free - the loss incurred isn't a loss personally. It is only really a loss of the time when we don't use it to add value, as it is a scarce resource.
This isn't to say that there isn't value in sitting down in front of the TV screen and watching something enjoyable, but there is definitely a diminishing returns equation to consider there and if we are spending tens of hours a week passively in front of a TV, perhaps we should reflect and consider what the emotional ROI is on it - is what we are getting out worth more to us than what we put in?
Energy might not be able to be created or destroyed, but it can be lost to us. Time is a type of energy too and regardless of whether we use it or not, it will be converted into something and, while we can save time, we can't store it in a battery for later usage - it is gone. So, we may as well take what we have, and create something we want.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
