Life = Time.

Life = Time.

Our life can be thought of as blocks of time. You can think of the blocks as years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes or even seconds.

Life expectancy in the USA for men and women (overall) is currently 78.11 and if I lived in Swaziland, my days would be numbered as I am turning 32 this December. See the Wikipedia article.  Thinking positive, I believe we should all plan to live to be 100. Planning to live to be 100 has both “Power of Positive Thinking” benefits as well as its a nice round number for easy calculation for understanding life as blocks of time in terms of years. Now that I think I have illustrated the concept, lets break down our lives into different size blocks and reflect.

Years

In the beginning of the Disney movie UP, it illustrates a young boy, Carl who is adventurous and he meets a young girl, Ellie who is also adventurous, maybe even more than Carl. Ellie shows him her Adventure Book that shows things she has done and dream of going one day and blank pages after a page labeled “STUFF I’m Going TO DO” where she saved pages for all the adventures she is going to have and specifically going to South America.  Ellie makes Carl promise that he will take her there one day. Years go by, they get married, build a home. More years go by, they work at the zoo, lay on the grass looking at shapes in the clouds dreaming. Years go by, they have a baby and sadly lose the baby. They start saving for the South America trip but life gets in the way with the car needing repairs, broken leg, tree falls on the house and they spend all of the savings. Years go by, and he continues to work at the zoo selling balloons. More years go by, they are elderly now, and Carl buys the trip to South America, only now its too late because Ellie has become ill and soon passes away.  It is very heavy start for what I thought was going to be light hearted comedy!

I believe the story of Carl and Ellie is all to familiar.

If we consider our lives in blocks of years, waiting until 65 to retire means that we spend 65% of our life working. Also at 65, it is somewhat likely that you will not be capable of the same things as when we are earlier in life, certainly for adventure.

For Carl and Ellie, things did not go as they originally hoped but in the end, reflecting on the blocks of years they still had a great time and many things to be thankful for.

Planning for years down the road is not practical without thinking of life in smaller blocks and smaller steps.

Months

Every month we pay our rent or mortgage, we pay utilities, we pay for luxuries and I don’t think many of us stop and consider the true cost.

Days

We wake up in the morning and get ready for the day in some way. Many of us get into a routine and others not so much. I know of someone who spends literally hours on her hair every morning.

There are 24 hours in a day. You spend probably 8 hours sleeping and that is 1/3, or 33.33% of your day. You probably work 8 hours, that’s another 33.33% of your day.  Now as your gift for reading this blog, I am going to give you another hour in your day! So now you have 25 hours in a day! OK, actually it has more to do with simple math and making it easy to calculate how much percentage time you spend with things. Then you can determine if you are content with how your time (and life) is spent on a percentage basis. Does it reflect your values? Goals? Ambitions? With 25, the math becomes easy, if you spend 1 hour doing something, you spend 4% of your day doing that. If you spend 2 hours, you spend 8% of your day doing that. Using this scale gives easier rounded percentages.

Sleep 32%  (8 hours)
Work 32% (8 hours)
Getting ready for work & commute 8% (2 hours)
Lunch at Work 4% (1 hour)
Maintain home / House duties 4% (1 hour)

Total 80%

The idea is multiple number of hours X 4 to get a rough percentage of time.

Oh, If you want to be super technical, feel free to add “Adjustment” of 4%

Hours

Many of us get paid one of two ways, salary or hourly. In reality, salary workers are hourly workers, but often trade additional hours to their employer with no extra hourly compensation. I would dare to say over 99% of salary workers don’t bother to figure out how much they are making per hour. I would dare to say the percentage would be very high for commission based salespeople also.

Most of us trade hours of our lives (blocks of our lives) for dollars. We then spend our dollars on things that we feel improves our non-working hours. We owe it to ourselves to know exactly how much we are trading hours of our life (blocks of our life) away for.

Time Trading

So if what I say about hours is true, we compromise some blocks of time in exchange for the hope (or reality) of improving the “quality” of other blocks of time. We trade time for something we may not really want to do (work), for the hope of improving the time when we do something we really like to do, or think we “need”.

The most precious commodity we have is our time and our earlier years could be argued as more precious and valuable than the later years. Yet many of us trade our best years away with little return on investment.

To determine if we are making good trades, some figures and math is helpful.

The Math

There are 876,657 hours in 100 years.
There are 684,712 hours in 78.11 years.
There are 569,827 hours in 65 years (retirement age).

There are 2,088 working hours in a year.
There are 8,766 total hours in a year.

There are 262 workdays in a year.
There are 365 days in a year.

With the above numbers, you can figure out some interesting things. For example, if you start work at 18 and work until retirement. 65-18 = 47 years. 47 x 2,088 = 98,136 career working hours.

Interesting thing to think about, if you put $1.00 aside for every hour you have worked at a job, how much money would you have today? Is that number less or more than you currently have in your retirement fund?

I believe we all should do math on Time (and therefore Life) on a regular basis. We should reflect on our previous years, months and weeks and evaluate ourselves and the time investments we are making every day.

Go LIVE

While I am not encouraging you to go out and quit your job. I do want to encourage you to pursue your passions and dreams.

You have probably heard the saying “Life is a journey, not a destination.”, while I agree, I believe we need to pursue the The Journey we dream of. We should not let circumstances around us determine our journey or discourage us from our journey.

We are given time and what we do with our life depends on how we spend blocks of our time.

The clock is ticking, what will you do now? and how will you spend your greatest commodity, Time.

Jared Farnum
JaredFarnum.com