Time Management: We are the deciders now of how to spend our time

Growing up, we had parents, teachers, bosses, friends and spouses telling us what to do and how to spend our time. Many of us as children and teens were overscheduled with school, music and dance lessons, sports, volunteer activities, clubs and more. As adults we had work and maybe children and parents, which structured our time. 

No longer. Since many of us have retired or are semi-retired, how we spend our time is on us. 

Throughout the years, we have learned to master a great deal. Most of us have figured out how to budget our funds, cut our calories, take care of our health and tackle so many other important tasks. However, with more time on our hands it’s easy to get flummoxed about how to spend our daily time. There is less structure and, in some cases, none, to our days. We spend our time in various ways and may feel those choices are a waste of time and unproductive.  

• Some of us, who are still working, spend most of our workdays doing…, yes…. work, and then wonder why we get nothing else done.
• Some who love exercise put it at the top of their to-do lists and make time daily or weekly to bicycle, go to yoga or Pilates classes, play tennis, golf, swim or myriad other activities that burn calories and calm the mind. Then, they wonder why they’re exhausted, sweaty and tired. “I don’t feel like making dinner.” “I’m too tired to clean.” “I’m going to bed early.”
• Still others read, paint, garden, go to wine tastings and do volunteer work. How joyful that they have so much fun, though they may be upset that they never cleaned their home, got the laundry done, did any grocery shopping and much more. Oh well.
• And then there are the procrastinators who put off almost everything that needs to be done—work, play, exercise, pay bills, return calls or emails—until the 11^th hour when they have no other choice but to do it. They rush-rush, admonishing themselves that they will never, ever, avoid everything again. 

In the end, all the results point to a similar question. Where does all our time go? Along with that comes more questions: How could we not have gotten anything done today (or yesterday)? How come we never find time to sit and read a newspaper or book or listen to the news or an opera? Why don’t we have time to catch up organizing our piles of papers or decluttering?

At our age, we have a dialogue in our heads that might go this way: Oh, we don’t have to make our beds daily if we don’t want to; forget doing those hospital corners. We don’t have to sit at a table and have three square meals if we don’t want to. We don’t even have to get up at any set time, unless we want to. In short, we can use the 24 hours each day gives us as we see fit! What a gift. 

Stop! The problem is we’re so used to being told to be productive, get stuff done and have proof of what we did to account for hours passed. In most cases, we’ve forgotten that doing nothing is really doing something and it’s okay. We are allowed to sit and stare at a wall if we so desire or just sit on a bench and look at the landscape. How lucky we can do so now. 

The result of all our thinking about time management is that we’d like to take a bit more charge of our time and make it work better for us as our personal clocks wind down. Time is ticking away, and it seems senseless to fritter away our minutes, hours, days. 

That doesn’t mean we’re going to have a long laundry list. In fact, we think we need to pencil in more time for nothing so we find time to smell the roses, notice the pastries piled high in our favorite store windows, see the remodeling work going on in a neighbor’s yard, stop and talk with some of the people who take the same routes we do daily whom we usually ignore—or they ignore us--and just notice changing puffy white and pink cloud formations in the sky as well as those threatening ones that recently unleashed two days of horrendous rains and winds. 

While it’s easy to decide to do this one day, it’s harder to do it over a long continuum. We’re merely suggesting we try to enjoy our time more and have fewer regrets. 

One solution is to make a list of what we like to do weekly, then mark off which pursuits we want to do daily or every other day over a week or any chosen time frame. We might use a big pie chart (we prefer blueberry) and draw in slices of all we want to consider. We’ll include anything that gives us joy, from sitting at our computer to researching anything, possibly making a list of the bucket list trips we want to take over the next five years or searching for recipes for the best strawberry short cakes and blueberry pies now that it’s summer and fruit is turning up everywhere. 

There’s something to be said for seeing our schedules in black and white and bold colors. And when we see our possible choices whether online, in a handwritten list or in a pie circle, we may see more clearly what we forgot to find time for such as a daily walk or calling different friends to stay in touch. We know contact with nature and people keeps us mentally and physically healthier and in reaching out we’re also adding joy to others’ lives.

The main lesson in using our time more intentionally but with no rights or wrongs is that there’s absolutely no downside. No reason to feel guilty. This is our time to revel in fun, new experiences, adventures, sometimes a pity party if we’re down or be there for someone who has had a big loss. In our two cases, we’re going to start today as time ticks, ticks away.