Investing Your Time vs. Spending Your Time
Images by Brooke Richardson Photography
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
Time. The true luxury in life. A resource we can never recover, or re-generate. It is our greatest and most precious resource. We all have 24 hours in a day (even Beyonce!), yet how many of us actually use those 24 hours optimally? How many of us get the very most we can out of each day??
“Time is what we want most but what we use worst.”
It's not easy! Especially on those days where you're exhausted from working/parenting/adulting. Some days you're 100% spent and just want to park it on the couch and lose yourself in the TV or a book or - lezbehonest - your Instagram feed.. It's completely understandable. However...it's key to remember how you spend your days is how you spend your life. "Just today" turns into "just this week" which morphs into "just this month" and on and on. Pretty soon five years have blown by and you're not any closer to your goals. Your life isn't how you envisioned it would be at this point.
And here's where our individualities come into play. My goals are likely different from your goals. While one person's goal may be to start and run a successful business, another's goal may be to get healthy, or to spend more quality "unplugged" time with their kiddos, or to cultivate a stress-relieving hobby.
How you spend your time is a reflection of your priorities. Pure and simple. If you value something enough, you make time for it. If you don't believe me, what if you were offered one million dollars if you worked out every single day for one hour, for a full month? Would you magically discover you have some time for fitness? Or what if you were promised an all-expense paid trip to the country of your choice if you meditated twice a day for a week straight? Would meditation suddenly get a bump up to the top of your priority list? Think about it...
“Guard your time fiercely. Be generous with it, but be intentional about it.”
A good rule to live by is no matter what you're doing, BE ALL THERE. If you're working out, go all in (no matter if it's an intense lifting/cardio sesh, or restorative yoga, or whatever). If you're meeting with your boss/colleagues/church members, laser in. If you're playing Barbies with your littles, drill down.
It's alllll about the quality, baby. If you're in the same room as your family/friends/partner, yet are more concerned with peeping your Snapchat than actually connecting with them, you're merely spending your time. If you get to the end of your day and realize...you really have nothing to show for it, you're simply spending your time. It's just like with money! You get your paycheck, and if you simply spend your remaining money (after handling bills/groceries/etc) on "fun stuff" like dinner out with friends, or movies with your lover, or new clothes/gear/whatever...it's gone. It's spent. However, if you [wisely] invest it...you more often than not will receive a return on your investment, and have something to show for it later (hopefully more than your original amount). Same concept.
To achieve true success, true balance, true fulfillment in your life, you must invest your time in the people/ventures you know will bring you true happiness. It is entirely possible to attain a real work/life balance, and (spoiler alert!) it doesn't involve working less and playing more, or even splitting it 50/50. It's about being intentional about how you spend your work time, and how you spend your personal time. I'm definitely not one to judge on what unwinding looks like for you, but chances are if you spend all weekend zoning out to The Real Housewives of OC, when Monday rolls around you don't feel re-charged and ready to take Monday by storm. Right??