Remember when you were a child? Well skip a few years ahead, I can’t remember much of my childhood at all. Remember when you were a teenager? Remember all the thoughts you had? All the thoughts you thought, all the moral, ethical, philosophical quandaries you deliberated with yourself in your head? All of the things you solved. You solved a lot and you shared it with your friends, and together you solved a great deal more! When you took your thoughts to another adult though, one older than you, they were disregarded. Superficially investigated and then thrown away… why? When I was a teenager I didn’t know why and it seemed awfully unfair… then I graduated from high school, got into college, began working and guess what? I stopped having those thoughts, I stopped being torn by ethical dilemmas and philosophical debates with myself and I stopped sharing with my peers.
I think I know why and how that happened, I think I know why “grown-ups” and adults don’t listen to teens. It isn’t because we know any better, or have valuable life lessons, or whatever bullshit you were given or are now giving out. No, its because I don’t, and most other adults don’t, think anymore! We simply don’t have the time… we’re too busy working, or pursuing our careers, or work on ourselves, or trying to relax, you can insert whatever it is you do, or see your peers doing. When was the last time you didn’t have to worry about anything and could just think…
Been quite awhile hasn’t it?
So how do you find these thoughts? It comes down to time. As a youth, as a teenager you had a lot of time… Time to think thoughts, follow chains of them, reject hypothesis after hypothesis and then synthesize your results from dozens, hundreds, or thousands of little conversations in your head into a cogent (mostly) theory. All that takes time though, and once you’ve left school, and left home, time becomes a commodity more valuable than gold. So valuable is it now that careerists – those stuck on the corporate or free-lance treadmill are trying to find a way to convert their money back into time! My guess though is that you have a lot of time, you just don’t realize how much of it gets wasted.
First you need to find time then. Where?
Like I said, you probably have mcuh more time than you think you do, you just don’t know how or where you’ve spent it. Here is where something I like to call a time budget comes in. Just like a normal bugdet, which takes expenses, cash flow, debots and credits a time budget tracks where and how you spend your time. Keep a time journal for a week, noting how long you spend doing any item, or nothing, after keeping meticulous track of how you spend your time analyze it. Where are you spending more time than you’d like to? Where are you wasting time? How better can you manage it? Once you’ve found areas of improvement, act! Stop spending so much time in front of a screen (TV, PC, or other).
Once you’ve found the time (and you will!) it’s time to start thinking about what helps you think most! Which is what the next post on this topic will be about.
Helpful links for finding time:
Finding Time – Stepcase Lifehack
Reclaim your Time – Zen Habits
Finding Time – In Context