I just recaptured an entire extra month of time -- each year -- into my life!
That is an additional 180 (ish) hours a year to my limited reserve of the time pool. Time is like a pool because it has limits and has multiple drains by which it is emptied.
As much as I have tried to create more than 168 hours of time in a week (24x7), that is one number which we have not been able to grow. The most recent issue of Samiracles Speaks, which sadly was not too recent--sorry about that--addressed methods by which you could squeeze more juice out of your time lime.
This discovery is a whole lot of juice, when measured over the course of a year or a lifetime.
Journaling is an activity which I have been doing regularly for 35 years. I still have many of the repositories which contain my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. I don’t know how much time I have spent on this activity but I thoroughly enjoy writing, and it has been an essential part of my journey and helped to overcome obstacles in my life from time to time.
For the last two years, I have been measuring journaling time and trying to maintain this at about 30 minutes a day. It is usually the first thing I do every day. I may not do it every day, and some days I write for longer, but 30 minutes is probably a good average.
Using that number of 30 minutes a day, over the course of a year, that is about 180 hours.
The standard “work week” is commonly defined as 40 hours. In my corporate life, I don’t think I ever worked less than 45 hours a week and probably averaged 50. During the current chapter of my life, I probably work about 25 - 30 hours a week, averaged over the course of the year.
So by stopping or minimizing journaling, I could save up to 180 hours a year, which is about an extra work month, if my math works correctly (180/45 ish) and my explanation flows well enough.
You may be wondering though, if I enjoy this and it has been helpful, why would I stop? My discovery through self-archaeology came this week as I have had writer’s block, or perhaps ‘journalers’ block and haven’t had much to note and reflect on. This caused me to examine why this was the case.
My hypothesis is that one-half to two-thirds of the content over the last 35 years has been about one specific topic with the remainder split between two or three smaller topics.
The main source of my writing has been mostly resolved now through a recent action, so apparently my head and soul don’t need a place to express this. We shall see if this holds; and I may still write about other things; but there is time to be saved here and not drained from the pool.
When you examine your own time pool, what drains are there that you could stop and add back to your pool?