Make Time, Not War

[image error]We get it—you're busy. No one has ever been (or will ever be) as busy as you. Between 60-hour work weeks, a strict devotion to CoreFusion, and volunteer work at your local YMCA, the idea of cooking dinner for yourself or meeting friends for a spontaneous midweek bottle of wine is laughable. Don't people understand how busy you are?

We've all experienced weeks where the number of hours in the day seems woefully insufficient, but lately, the reliable catch-all excuse of "too busy" has come under siege. A recent Wall Street Journal article calls us out on our chronic time fog, suggesting that we replace the words, "I don't have time," with, "It's not a priority." We gave it a whirl. We found it enlightening, but unexpectedly and perhaps unwarrantedly jarring in situations where being "busy" is contextual rather than general—when the amount of time you "have" is contingent on circumstance rather than priority.

We're not proposing that we let ourselves entirely off the hook here, particularly when it comes to our habits and our relationships. For general life evaluation and long-term task-setting, the priority question is an useful one. We're simply proposing that we let go of the guilt. We don't need to feel like terrible people for not having time. We just need to think about why we don't have time. We need to transform time from passive to active.

So here's our version of the WSJ's mantra: Time is made, not had.

There are two ways to make time. One is preventative. When you have a moment, spend it wisely. Think of "free time" like a savings account—do what you've gotta do at the first opportunity you get, and save your "free time" for a rainy day. That way, when you get a call that your crew is rallying on a Tuesday night, you can grab your keys and go without hesitation. How often do we miss out because we've already frittered away our "free time" on something that, given the choice, we would have wanted to do less? Jersey Shore is not worth it. We're not saying you have to spend every free moment being social—believe us, we know the healing power of a trash TV marathon! But at least do the important stuff first, so that if something more appealing comes along, you haven't already made your choice.

The second way is training ourselves to bang out the everyday nitty-gritties with more efficiency. This is a big one for the perfectionists among us, for whom the temptation to approach every task with the methodical precision of a neurosurgeon is a concern. You could spend 10 minutes making your bed in the morning—smoothing out every wrinkle, painstakingly folding back the top sheet to peek out from under the comforter just so. But in reality, you could get the same effect in 30 seconds. The room would still look tidy. It would still feel every bit as wonderful to pull back the covers and climb into a swiftly, even sloppily made bed after a long day. And that's nine minutes and 30 seconds you can spend doing something you care about.

Making time is about going from having a to-do list to making a to-do list. When time management feels active rather than passive, you may find that the notion of "fitting it all in" isn't so ill-fitting after all.

—Emma Aubry Roberts