If you spent your time like you spent your money, how much time would you have left? I have 9,460,800 minutes left. You can calculate this by doing the following:
1.Find you’re expected life span. Go to Google and type in “life span calculator” or go to the following website: http://www.cancer-info.com/life_span_calculator.htm
2.If you live in the USA and are reasonably healthy, you might just assume 78 if you are male and 82 if you are female.
3.Subtract your current age in years from your expected lifespan.
4.Multiply your “remaining” years, by 525,600/This is the number of minutes in a year.
The figure that you get will be the number of minutes you have left to “spend.” Chances are you will be a millionaire. Now the question is “how will you spend your time.” Unlike money, you cannot choose not to spend it. Whether you choose or not, your time will be spent. The only choice you have is how you will spend your time. I have just spent 30 minutes of my time writing this short reflection. Was it worth it?
My hope is that it will help you to think about how precious time is and how fast we spend it. If I have accomplished this goal, then my time was well spent. If not, well, “tomorrow’s another day.” How many minutes do you have left to spend? Will you spend them wisely or will you “waste” them. What is a wise choice for you? Do you feel that you are making these choices? Why not? What will it take for you to spend your time more
I'm a millionaire (in minutes) too. However, consider a newborn baby that will live to be 90. She has less than 33,000 days to spend. Put that way it strikes me as a low number (especially because I have already lived over 23,000 days). I read a book a couple of years back by a Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, called "No Time to Lose". She emphasized how great an opportunity it was to be born a human being (because in her belief system only human beings are in a position to achieve enlightenment). So, for her, there is a great urgency to make progress on that path. If we feel there is something important we must accomplish, we will value our time and perhaps become like misers, spending it on the pursuit of our overriding goal and nothing else. Others of us "waste" our time playing computer solitaire or watching television. My guess is that there is a happy medium. I am easily distracted by people and things that come up in the course of my days, and most often wend a seemingly random path, but I do get to have a lot of experiences that way that I would miss if I were completely focused on reaching some goal I had set in advance.
ReplyDeleteBruce, I like the quote that says " Spend your money like you will live forever but spend your time like each day will be your last." I know people who are goal oriented and some not. I wonder if it makes a difference on the happiness scale? They say pessimists live longer but optimists are happier!
ReplyDeleteI think both of them are important, money and time and in retrospect, if we spend our time the way we spend our money, I think we would be more healthy, have more money and probably live longer because we usually think before we spend our money but most times...we just lavish our time...am really reflecting about my time
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