Why You Have The Time

“In truth, people can generally make time for what they choose to do;
it is not really the time but the will that is lacking.” – Sir John Lubbock. 

              What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for? Train and race a marathon? Learn how to play the piano? Write a screenplay? Be a better spouse? Consistently practice yoga? Finally read Crime and Punishment? Go grocery shopping and cook for yourself so you finally eat healthier?

              Take a second and think about what exactly it is you want to do, though my guess is that it won’t take you that long. My guess is you knew it the moment I asked, that you think about it almost daily.  

              All I ask is that you don’t forget it in the next few minutes. I’ll come back to it later.

              First, let’s break a week down. No matter how much time you think you do or do not have, everyone starts their week with 168 hours. Now let’s say you get a good 8 hours sleep every night. That leaves you with 112 unused hours in your week. You work 40 hours? Now you’ve got 72 hours left. An hour commute round-trip, five days a week leaves you with 67 hours. An hour for breakfast, an hour for lunch and another hour for dinner, seven days a week, leaves you with 46 hours.

At this point, you’ve covered the essentials; you’ve slept well, you’ve eaten well, and you’ve worked hard (I know some people work more than 40 hours a week, so feel free to adjust the math accordingly, but also remember you probably don’t allocate an hour for each meal) and after all that – after the work, the meals, the commute, the sleep -- you’ve got 46 hours that are yours.

So where do those 46 hours go? According to the Nielsen “Three Screen Report” from 2009, practically all of it goes in to watching television. The report found that the average American watches 151 hours of tv a month (so if we assume a 4 week month), that’s 37.75 hours spent in front of television a week, or 22% of the entire week. To think of it another way, if you watch that much television, your week effectively gets shortened from seven days to five-and-a-half days.

Now, after those 37.75 hours have been taken away, we’re only left with 8.25 hours in our week, and we haven’t even accounted for things like time spent on the internet or exercise or domestic chores like laundry. It’s easy to see how people who make time for television don’t have much time left for other things.

But maybe you read all that and thought to yourself that you watch tv, but you certainly don’t watch close to five and a half hours a day. Maybe you’re a sports fan, so you just watch two college football games on Saturday and a couple more pro games on Sunday. Given that on television the average football game takes three hours to watch, that’s twelve hours in front of a television right there. This is of course assuming you watch nothing else for the rest of the week besides those games (no endless re-runs of Sportscenter), and those games don’t take longer than expected due to lengthy injuries or overtime. Now spending twelve hours watching football isn’t a bad thing, but keep in mind that twelve hours a week is enough time to train for and eventually race a half-Ironman triathlon. Those same twelve hours could be divided between things like daily exercise, playing with your kids, taking language classes or even writing little articles about how to spend your time.  

It’s pretty clear that for almost all of us, it’s not a question of how much time we have as much as it is a question of how we spend that time. If you love watching television, that’s fine. But understand that it comes at a cost. By choosing to have time to watch things like Jersey Shore and Real Housewives and Glee, you are also choosing to not have time for other areas of your life.

                Remember what you thought of earlier? The thing you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for? If you turned off the television right now and never turned it back on, you would almost certainly have more than enough time for whatever it is that you wanted. You only need an hour a day to start your novel, thirty minutes three days a week to start an exercise program. It really is that simple.

So the next time somebody tells you they’re chasing a dream of theirs, don’t cheapen it by saying that “you’d love to do something like that, but you just don’t have the time.” We are all working with the same 168 hours. It’s just that some people turn off the tv and make time, while others leave it on and make excuses. Which one are you?