We feel like we’re busy all day long, this feeling lets us say we’re productive. What is it really like? What do we really do with our days? Are we active, directing or even creative or just lethargic?
Without us realising it, we spend a large part of our days “maintaining” ourselves, whether it is eating, washing, cooking, cleaning, dressing, social interaction or even working in some way. A large part of our time is taken up with our physiology or social interactions. Of the remaining time we only do what we have to do, i.e. work. This explains why we feel a sense of unfulfilment. How can we feel fulfilled when little of our energy is devoted to lifting?
In order to feel this need for fulfilment, we have to deliberately cut in half or even more of the time spent on daily tasks. In a way, we need to slow down the pace of these maintenance tasks in order to have more time for something other than physiological or sociological needs. If you do this, you will have more time and energy to devote to self-improvement. Here is a non-exhaustive list of things that will take you in the right direction:
eat once or twice a day: if you eat less often, your body will spend less time digesting and you will spend less time cooking, you will have more time available for your brain
forget about fashion: you will waste more time buying trendy clothes
reduce your time spent on information
avoid unnecessary travel and interaction
reorganise your day so that it is centred on the tasks that are most important to you and not on maintenance tasks
etc.
Take inspiration from Eisenhower’s matrix (1) but present it in another way to make it more inspiring for you, as follows:
The idea is that you keep the maintenance tasks for steps (a) and (b) to a minimum so that you have as much time and energy as possible to spend on the activities that lift us up. The idea is to separate what is important from what is not in order to make the right choices. Some activities will simply be eliminated (d) after a careful study of what is important to you.
Eisenhower’s matrix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method
