Time Management
What Are You Really Living For?

What Are You Really Living For?

"I wish I'd spent more time with my family" is a much more likely deathbed sentiment.

List the three things in life that mean the most to you. Taken together, they might be your reason for living.

Here's how Americans completed that list in a recent national survey. The number listed next to each item indicates the percentage of people surveyed who listed it among their top three priorities. (So obviously the numbers add up to more than 100%.)

Priority                 Percentage
Family life                     68%
Spiritual life                   46%
Health                          44%
Financial situation         25%
Job                              23%
Romantic life                18%
Leisure time                 14%
Home                           11%

Got your list? Good. Now next to each of the three note the amount of time you spend on it each week.

Shocked?

If you aren't spending large chunks of time on the three elements you've listed as the most important priorities in your life, there are three possible explanations:

1. Important things don't necessarily require a lot of time.
2. You're mistaken about your priorities.
3. You aren't putting your time where your priorities are.

Let's examine each explanation.

Does the Way You Spend Your Time Truly Reflect Your Values?
The Myth of "Quality Time"
Two strong social forces combined to move Harriet Nelson and June Cleaver out of the kitchen and into the workforce.

First, we began to require two salaries to keep up with our increasing material expectations. In 1985, less than 2 percent of American homes had CD players in them, and only about 7 percent had answering machines. By 1996, two thirds of our homes had CD players and 63 percent had answering machines. These are our new "necessities."

At the same time, women began giving public expression to the notion that being "just" a housewife didn't allow them to develop fully or to take their place as equal partners with men in society. They didn't just need jobs; they wanted careers.

As more and more former stay-at-home moms took jobs outside the home, the myth of the Superwoman developed. "You can have it all" translated into "You must DO it all!"

Surveys noted that the distribution of housework didn't change in many homes even when the woman took an outside job. After a full day's work at the office, many women came home to another full day's work.

The term quality time was born.

As women joined their husbands in having less and less time for the kids and for their partners, social thinkers (i.e., freelance magazine writers) developed the theory that a little bit of very good time together would compensate for the lack of lots of time together. The more we talked about "quality time," the more we came to believe in its reality.

But "quality time" is a sham, a hoax, a cruel delusion. Instead of "quality time," we simply have less time, and what time we've got is really "pressure time."

If you can honestly tell me that you can schedule a meaningful conversation with your adolescent son or daughter, or that lovemaking by appointment doesn't lose a little something in spontaneity, I'll believe in "quality time." But relationships don't work that way. You can no more force a teenager to talk before he or she is ready than you can convince a cat to play Scrabble.

There's no hurrying or scheduling meaningful moments, breakthrough conversations, wonderful gestures. They occur in the midst of the muck, often when we least expect them. If you aren't spending time with a loved one, you're going to miss many of those moments. And you'll be putting much too heavy a burden on the time you do have together. "Quality time" turns into tension time.

Are You Mistaken about Your Priorities?

If you aren't spending much time on family or spiritual life or health maintenance, for example, then maybe these aren't really the most important things in your life.

Could you be wrong about your own priorities? Well, sure. In the incredibly complex interactions of conscious mind, subconscious motive, and psyche, we're perfectly capable of masking our true motivations from ourselves even as we might seek to hide them from or misrepresent them to others.

Also, the process of writing a list of priorities is different from the process of living your life. Your list could reflect the things you think of when asked to make a list, just as the opinion you give to a pollster might represent the opinion you would have if you had an opinion.

You might have listed the elements you think you're supposed to list, the elements it's acceptable or right to value most highly. You really wanted to list "making a pot of money" as your number-one priority, but somehow you just didn't feel right doing so. You knew that "family" was the "right" answer.

It's possible that you misrepresented your priorities-on a list that only you will see, in a book designed solely to help you make decisions about how you spend your time. It's possible-but it isn't very likely.

If you'd like to go back now and change your list to accurately reflect your values, that's ok. It's your list. But I suspect you got it right the first time.

Which brings us to the third possible explanation, that you aren't putting your time where your heart is.

Why Aren't You Spending Time on the Important Stuff?
Actually, there are three rather simple explanations, and none of them requires that you be a beast, a hypocrite, or a fool.

1. Time Spent Making Money Is Time Spent on the Family

We aren't just working for VCRs and second cars. We're working to feed and clothe our children and to keep a roof over our heads. We're working so that the government won't have to take care of us. We're working so that we'll be self-sufficient even when we're too old to work (or we're pushed out of our jobs because of a mandatory retirement age).

If you're lucky, your vocation may also be an avocation, even a passion, helping you to grow and develop intellectually. You may have been able to integrate your spiritual life and your work life. It isn't necessarily a strict either/or choice.

2. Working at Your Job Is Easier Than "Working at" Your Family

Jobs often comprise well-defined tasks. They aren't necessarily easy or even pleasant, but they're clear. You know what you're supposed to do, and you know what it's supposed to look like when you finish. Something outside yourself tells you when you've done well and when you need to work harder.

Knowing exactly how to "have a good family life" or to "be healthy" can be a lot harder, and the "product" of your efforts here is often intangible.

3. Social Pressure Rewards Traditional Concepts of Work

Even when you begin telling yourself that other aspects of life are important, too, you don't slack off on the job expectations in the slightest. Somehow you're supposed to devote more time to family without taking a minute from work-more of that "you can do more with less" nonsense, the underpinning for a belief in "quality time."