I have been touching on this subject for the last 2 weeks but I thought I would just tackle it now because it is really starting to irritate me to the point where I have to start making bigger plans and creating deadlines to get out of the current situation I’m in.
There is 24 hours in the day, any genius could tell you that. But how many hours are in your day? How many hours do you have available in the day to do the things you want to do, or if you love your current situation how many hours of the day do you spend doing the things you love.
Start calculating your hours in the day differently. How many hours of the day are you living the life the way you want to live it, lets call them living hours and compare them to disposable hours, the hours that are thrown away doing things you don’t like doing.
Lets break this down a little bit for someone who is working a standard 9am-5pm job.
So you are working a 9-5 job. There is 8 hours of your day and depending on your work situation you are either working in a job you love, which would count towards your Living Hours or working a job you don’t love which would count towards your disposable hours.
Secondly we all need sleep, so calculate your average sleep time, ideally it would be between 6-8 hours and add that to the disposable hours. The more you train your body to live off 6 hours sleep instead of 8 there is 2 extra hours you have just gained to do what you want with.
Over the course of the week those 2 extra hours would add up to 14 hours and if you factor in sleep of 6 hours you have almost gain a day of potential living hours just by reducing your sleep hours by 2 hours.
Now if you are already on 6 hours of sleep I don’t recommend reducing that any further.
So we have work 8 hours, sleep 6 hours which takes us to 14 hours total. Now I want you to factor in any commuting time to and from work. In my situation it is 30 minutes one way so there is another hour of the day gone taking my disposable hours to 15. Now from the time I get up 7:30am to the time I leave to go to work 8:30am I wouldn’t exactly call those ‘Living Hours’ so there goes another hour.
I am up to 16 of a possible 24 hours of my day classified at disposable hours. That means from there at best I have 8 hours of the day left to do what I want to do.
This is outrageous to me! If someone came up and said to me, you will only spend maximum one third of your life doing what you want to do and what makes you truly happy I would have told them they were crazy.
The first thing you need to do is find a job you love, or create a job you love. Instantly you have the potential to double your Living Hours! DOUBLE! Essentially increasing your enjoyment by 100% it is a change that too many of us over look.
I look back at the happiest times of my life, and it was working at Summer Camp. I got 7 hours sleep and every single hour after that was ‘Living Hours’ for 3 months straight and then for another 3 months the following year.
I was so happy because every single day I had banked 17 living hours. That was more than double what I was banking back at home every single day.
Even as I write that 17 hours of the day I was doing exactly what I loved doing for 3 months straight, it is definitely eye opening.
My next challenge is to replicate those living hours and make my life at home the same ratio. I know it is going to take some planning and some large decisions but the reward is worth it. You are literally doubling the amount of time you can spending living your life working on the projects you want to be working on and exploring the places around you or just catching up with the friend you haven’t seen in a while.
Now I just want to say that I am not saying leave your 9am-5pm just tomorrow but if it is a draining you pick a deadline today to leave, if there is more you need to learn there or something you want to achieve stop messing around and get it done but most importantly set a deadline to leave.
Start looking for something that will make you happy. It doesn’t have the be the highest paying job but it does have to make you smile each and every day.
Work out your finances and put in place the steps to make it happen.
Secondly
Work out how many Living Hours you have available in your own day and where you can add more living hours or what aspect of your life needs to change so you have time to do the things you want to do.
Take these steps today and take control back of your own life.
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