I have been tracking my time for the last 15 months. I intended to go for a year, and then I kept going! I don’t find it onerous. Then again, my father has read 30 minutes of Hebrew daily for 39 years. Perhaps I come from habit-keeping stock.
So, over the next few days, I will be running a series here on the blog that addresses a question I get from time to time: what if I’m not the kind of person who is, you know, into spreadsheets? Or what if I’m “bad” at time management? When a person tells me that, I tend to point out that he is functional enough to have hauled himself to whatever event we are both attending, so I know the situation can’t be too dire. But generally what it means is that this person is never going to concern himself with the p-values on the correlation between the age of one’s youngest child and available leisure time. He just wants some simple strategies to feel more in control (and maybe not always be running late).
I know many people feel tied down by their schedules. Much like financial independence, there is much to be said for time freedom. It is wonderful to go through life feeling off the clock. Your time is your own. You feel satisfied with the way you are spending it. For me, knowing yearly tallies on exercise or reading or time spent in the car helps for that, but that is not the only way of achieving this goal. There are simple tactics for achieving a similar sense of effective calm that involve absolutely no spreadsheets whatsoever. Over the next few days I’ll be writing about those, so please follow along! And if you enjoy the series, please do me a favor and share these posts with someone who doesn’t normally read this blog. I appreciate it!