Make ‘Em All Count

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Or so we are told. Plus or minus, of course. Nothing is that precise. But we say that there are 60 seconds in a minute all the same.

There are 604,800 seconds in a week. Recognizing that there are 60 seconds in a minute, that comes out to 10,080 minutes in a week. We sleep through a lot of those. We eat through a lot of those. We coast through a lot of those. If we mash them up together, we can measure the activities in our lives in terms of hours. We say that there are 60 minutes in an hour.

There are 168 hours in a week. We are unconscious through a lot of those, and I mean that in more than just the literal sense. Sleep was covered a few sentences ago, so I am talking about the time we spend putzing around, going through the motions, and not really taking an active role in what is going on around us. Of course, there are plenty of hours filled with purposeful activity, time we spend doing what needs to get done. We spend hours each week accomplishing things we want to, we need to, and we are force to. We do our best to strike a balance.

Or do we?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course, and it is one that requires reflection. So, reflect on it. Do you do your best to strike a balance between what you have to do and what you want to do? We are taught from an exceptionally young age that life is filled with things that we won’t want to do. Adults around us convince us that life consists of a lot of filler between moments of actual joy and pleasure. “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend,” that old Loverboy tune, could be the anthem for how we are trained to think about our week. As we get older, they start teaching us about the work week. It’s not just the people we know, either. Our training is reinforced at school, on TV, in the movies…lots of places. We come to learn a traditional view of the work week: 5 days of crap, and 2 days of bliss, in a continual cycle that abruptly ends at death. Woo-hoo. That’s a life worth living.

Marcus Buckingham has a (trademarked…I’ll tread cautiously here) exercise that he calls “The Strong Week Plan.” The essence of the plan is this: make sure every week is spent advancing your life towards your goals. That’s a grossly over-simplified version of it, but that’s the essence of his plan. His book “Go Put Your Strengths to Work” gets into it much more in depth, and reading through the book sort of requires you to actually build your own plan. It’s worth the time and effort. To me, the idea is startling: make every week a week that advances your goals, both career and personal.

A traditional work week is 40 hours, 2400 minutes, or 144,000 seconds. Those seconds represent a significant portion of the time you are awake.

Strive to be conscious for as many as possible. Strive to be present for as many as possible. Strive to give yourself the most that you can for as many as possible.

Each one is borrowed. Each one is precious.

Make ’em all count.