Time for things that matter

Last night, I deleted Solitaire Associations from my smartphone.

This may sound like an ordinary act of digital housekeeping, but it was actually a significant personal sacrifice. Solitaire Associations is my airplane game. I have a very specific rule that I can only play it while flying. It is a small reward for being trapped in a metal tube at 30,000 feet with a stranger reclining their seat directly into my knees.

But I found myself opening the app at home. I played a few rounds and then realized I was breaking the rules. Worse, I was spending time on something I had deliberately decided belonged to a very specific category of time. So I deleted it.

I would like to tell you this was a profound moment of discipline. It was not. It was more like an intervention.

Still, it got me thinking about how often we talk about time as though it is something we are constantly running out of.

I don’t have enough time. There aren’t enough hours in the day. I wish I had more time.

We say these things about work, family, exercise, friends, hobbies, errands, sleep and approximately 47 emails that somehow appeared while we were answering the previous 46.

The problem is we usually cannot actually create more time. Every person gets the same 24 hours.

The CEO gets 24. The person working three jobs gets 24. The person who somehow manages to run five kilometres before work gets 24, although I strongly suspect they are operating under a different set of rules.

What we can control is what we do with the time we have.

That sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly difficult because time does not arrive with labels. Nobody hands us a calendar on Jan. 1 and says, “Here are your 8,760 hours. Please allocate 16 per cent to relationships, 12 per cent to health, eight per cent to personal growth and absolutely no more than three per cent to scrolling through videos of dogs diving underwater.”

Instead, our time gets consumed.

Some of it gets consumed by things that matter. Some gets consumed by things that have to be done. Some gets consumed by things that are simply there.

That last category is dangerous.

We can spend an hour scrolling through our cellphones, another hour answering messages that could have waited, 45 minutes in meetings that could have been emails and another 20 minutes reading an article about a celebrity we didn’t know existed until approximately 11 minutes earlier. Then we look at the clock and wonder where the day went.

The answer is usually not that we didn’t have enough time. It is that our time went somewhere.

This is where I think we need to change the question. Instead of asking, “How can I find more time?” perhaps we should ask, “Is the time I have going toward the things that matter to me?”

That is a much more uncomfortable question.

Because if you are constantly saying you don’t have time to exercise, but you have watched six episodes of a TV series this week, you have time. If you say you never have time to call your parents, but you spend an hour every evening scrolling social media, you have time. If you say you don’t have time for a hobby, but you have spent three hours reorganizing your email inbox by colour, you definitely have time.

The issue isn’t necessarily time. It is priority.

I don’t say that judgmentally, because some things genuinely do take over our lives. Work can be demanding. Children need things. Aging parents need things. Houses need cleaning. Groceries do not purchase themselves, despite my repeated requests to the universe.

There are seasons when our capacity is limited and survival gets priority. That is real.

But even within those limitations, it is worth paying attention to where our time is going.

One of the simplest ways to do this is to think about your values before you think about your calendar.

What actually matters to you?

Maybe it is family. Maybe it is your health. Maybe it is your career. Maybe it is creativity, community, friendships, learning, travel or simply having enough quiet time to sit on the couch without anyone asking you where something is.

Once you know what matters, look at your calendar. Does your life actually reflect those values?

This can be a surprisingly effective exercise because our calendars are often much more honest than our intentions.

We can say family is our top priority, but if every evening is spent answering work emails, the calendar is telling a different story. We can say our health matters, but if exercise is perpetually the first thing cancelled when the week gets busy, that tells us something, too.

The goal is not to turn your life into a productivity spreadsheet. Please don’t do that. There are already enough spreadsheets in the world.

The goal is simply to notice.

Maybe you need to protect an hour every Sunday for family dinner. Maybe you need to stop accepting every meeting invitation. Maybe you need to put your phone in another room for 30 minutes. Maybe you need to schedule time for something you enjoy instead of assuming you will magically find time for it later.

You probably won’t. “Later” is one of the biggest thieves of our time.

We tell ourselves we’ll call the friend later. We’ll exercise later. We’ll read later. We’ll take the course later. We’ll start the hobby later. Eventually, later becomes next year.

The strange thing is that we are often very good at protecting time for things other people consider important.

We show up for meetings. We meet deadlines. We take our children to appointments. We get the work done. But when it comes to ourselves, we treat our time as the flexible category.

That is worth reconsidering.

Your time does not have to be maximized. It has to be meaningful.

Some of the best uses of an hour will look completely unproductive. Sitting with a friend over coffee may accomplish nothing measurable. Reading a novel may not improve your career. Taking a walk may not produce deliverables. Playing a solitaire app on an airplane certainly isn’t going to solve the world’s problems.

But if those things bring you joy, connection or rest, they may be exactly what that hour was for.

Which brings me back to Solitaire Associations.

I deleted it because I had decided playing it on an airplane was part of the fun. The restriction actually made the game more enjoyable. It gave that little activity a place in my life.

Maybe we need to do more of that.

Instead of trying to squeeze more into every available minute, perhaps we should become more intentional about what deserves our minutes in the first place.

You don’t necessarily need more time. You may just need to spend a little more of the time you already have on the people, activities and experiences that make your life feel like yours.

And when my next flight rolls around, I’ll download Crossword Associations from the cloud and get back to it at 30,000 feet, exactly where it belongs.

Tory McNally, CPHR, B.Sc., vice-president, professional services at TIPI Legacy HR+ (formerly Legacy Bowes), is a human resource consultant, relationship builder and problem solver. She can be reached at tmcnally@tipipartners.com