We all get busy, and we all fall behind on the most important things that we set out to do in life. A few months ago I figured out a new way to take a visual inventory of All The Things, which has been really helpful for me. So, we're going to walk through a visual assessment of where we are in terms of how we are spending our lives today and then discuss the results.
You'll need either a pencil and paper, or a spreadsheet app like Excel, Numbers, or Google Docs. Describing this purely with text can get dicey, so I've included screenshots along the way.
Step 1)
Set up a series of columns, running vertically, with labels such as these across the top:
"Really not needed | Some people think I should | I really want to | I definitely need to"
These are subjective measurements of the 'level of importance' for all of the things we spend time doing. Your own labels can be different from these, but the point is to create a down-sloping trend of importance through these labels.
This is going to be our X-axis, in a manner of speaking.
Step 2)
Set up a series of rows crossing through these columns, with labels like so:
Excessive
Perfect
Satisfactory
Somewhat
Half-assed
Barely
Not even close
Not even started
These labels, in contrast to what's above, are intended to indicate how much you actually spend your time doing the things. Make sure to leave extra gaps between these labels. These will comprise our Y-axis, so to speak.
Step 3)
Open up a new document or tear off a sheet of paper — something aside from the graph. We’ll use this as our scratch sheet, so start listing out all the things that you either do use your time for, and/or all the things that you ought / wish / want to use your time for. I mean hobbies, spending time with people, eating, vegging out, playing sports, fulfilling or failing at obligations — literally everything you spend time doing.
We’re almost done, hang with me.
Step 4)
Now, one at a time, take your activities and copy / paste them into the place where they belong in the activity graph.
To do this, grab one activity at a time, and decide which column it should go into first. Is it actually important, or is it actually not that important? Then, locate the activity correctly on the Y-axis by honestly noting whether you have spent enough time on this thing, or not so much. One by one continue this process until your whole list of things is spread across the graph.
Keep in mind, the Y-axis is going to be subjective. I might spend six hours a week playing table tennis, and two hours a week lifting weights, and those might both go at the level of 'Perfect' for me. But for somebody else that might be ridiculous. It’s subjective. This is about your own goals, and what you truly find important.
But don't sweat too much about the precise placement of any single data point. That's not the idea here. The useful part is the overall lay of the graph, which emerges at the end.
A recreation of my old-time graph from ~6 months ago.
Discussion)
Many of you will have gotten the idea before getting too far into this exercise. What happens when we plot out our activities is that the general balance in our lives emerges visually in the form of broad correlations or lack thereof. That's where this exercise is truly instructive.
The first time I did this my activities were just all over the board with no appreciable pattern. This reflected my general sense of busyness at the time, and the sensation I was falling behind in my most important things, while giving time away to less important hobbies and distractions. This woke me to a few things:
It confirmed my suspicion that I had my interest invested in too many things.
It confirmed my suspicion that I was using less-important distractions as an escape from more difficult and important goals, which would have been more rewarding.
It offered background evidence to confirm the hypothesis that I acquire numerous hobbies and proficiencies as a way of making myself feel better.
Ultimately the last epiphany was the most useful, because it came closest to the root problem. I faced an inner dissatisfaction with my value as a person, and was using talents and projects as a means of self-validation. As a way to impress other people, and console myself, with my myriad of works. Consequently, my myriad of works were pulling me away from the very things that actually gave value and meaning to my life.
Over the last six months or so I've looked more closely at all this. I've taken note of the deep value of all the things I put in the right columns, even though they aren't so exciting on paper. By letting go of a lot of the bullshit hobbies and useless distractions gradually my graph has started to right itself, and I feel more full and whole than I used to. The graph below isn’t exhaustive by any means, but if you compare the distribution of things in the before above, and after below, you quickly get the idea. The shape of the graph is everything.
Your results, of course, will vary.
A more recent, quick graph for the modern day.
The ideal result from this exercise would be a pretty uniform horizontal line going across all columns at the level of Perfect / Satisfactory. That would mean your time is perfectly and proportionally invested in all things that are work, rest, distraction, and play. If you have this result, then a great big kudos to you. You are either exceptionally conscientious about your waking hours, or you are exceptionally proficient at lying to yourself.
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This guest post was written by Ian Schumann, a man I'm proud to call a close friend and fellow dreamer. In his blog Return From Exile you can find his analytic take on culture, community, and the Kingdom of Goodness. When Ian is not musing and toying with graphs he enjoys the roaming outdoors, eating breakfast on his back porch, playing ping-pong, and snuggling with his wife Nicole.
