Time

"Life is long enough, and it's been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested."
- Seneca

It’s hard to make goals for yourself and even harder to track your time to see if you are achieving them. Sometimes you might not even know what your goals are.

Next time you try to figure out your goals, try this:

For a week, write down every task or activity you have accomplished — big or small, at work or at home — and note how long it took you to complete.

From this list pick the things that you think fit your long term goals for yourself. If you don’t know what your long term goals are, just pick the things that make you feel like you have accomplished something you enjoy doing. Let’s call this “Creative time”.

Now add up all the time you spent on the activities you marked as
“Creative time”

Now take that number and do this calculation:
(Hours of creative time x 0.89* = Creative time %)

For example if I spent 15 hours that week on “creative time” activities then my calculation would look like this (15 x 0.89*)= 13.3%.

So that is 13.3% of your waking time (let’s assume you sleep 8 hours a night!) spent on the things you would call you long term goals.

This idea not only lets you calculate how much time you spent on your “creative time” or your long term goals but it also helps you identify the kinds of activities you think of as supporting your long term goals.

By going through this exercise you will have created a tool for yourself to understand and identify your long term goals. What you come up with might surprise you — or not — but what’s important is that now you have a starting point. Something to build on for the future.

The process of tracking and reflecting provides an answer to one of our most difficult questions, without the overwhelming feeling of needing to know everything often associated with setting goals. Now that you have your own tool, your own yardstick, it’s worth using it every couple of months to see if your long terms goals have changed. What are they now and how much time do you want to spend making them real?