Also, your family loves knowing you will do things for them they could have done themselves. Your employer loves knowing you’ll respond to every email, even if it means working long nights and weekends. Of course, other people love the fact that you pivot to their priorities and away from your own. You’re reacting to demands on your time that distract you from, wait, what was it you were supposed to do this morning? Oh yeah, the new client proposal. From breakfast to afternoon to the way home, you’re swinging from task to task at someone else’s whim. Wouldn’t you know it! Your old roommate from college just landed her dream job well, you’ve just got to leave a message. Just then, a little red icon appears on the Facebook app. Hoping no one notices, you decide to do a little email checking on your phone. You decide to address your messages later so you attend the client meeting only to discover you weren’t really needed there. “Can you join us for this client meeting?” You start plowing through a few of the most urgent ones only to get a text on your phone from your colleague. That’s when you see your email inbox is overflowing with thirty new messages. Twenty minutes later, Jim leaves and you finally open your laptop to get some work done. But then Jim from Accounting drops by to say “hi” and asks you how your weekend was. You sit down at your desk and decide to spend some time working on that new client proposal. Or you make breakfast and your toddler wanted oatmeal instead of eggs, so you remake the meal. What do you do? You abandon your plans to join the hunt. But your teenage daughter can’t find the shirt she wanted to wear for school today. Your plan was to wake up and pray or meditate. Think of all the ways people steal your time. Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher, wrote, “People are frugal in guarding their personal property but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.” Although Seneca’s words are more than two thousand years old, they are just as applicable today.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |