If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of. – Bruce Lee
What are you doing with your time? Are you loving it, or wasting it?
What does that mean?
Time, it just keeps on ticking away. You will never know exactly when your time will be all used up. Even the great or famous people, like the author of today’s quote, never know when their time is up. Wasting time is wasting your life. You just never know when you will be out of time.
Our lives are made of moments. Most are fairly normal, but many are special. If we take time to make each moment a little more special, and some of them a lot more special, you begin to see why wasting time is wasting some of the best moments of our lives.
If we manage our time, keep the waste to a minimum and work at making the most of what time we have, we enrich our lives. By extension, we also enrich the lives of the others with whom we share our time. When we love life, we live it to the fullest, and waste as little as possible.
Why is not wasting time important?
If you read blogs for enjoyment, I don’t consider it wasted time (unless you allow it to suck away hours of your life each day). Similarly, blogs that provide useful information, tips, or techniques aren’t wasted time either (and I hope this blog falls into the latter category).
How do you waste time? What things do you do which bring no joy, no value, and provide no help to yourself or others? What happens to that time? How does it impact your quality of life? Is it possible to have a life you love and still waste a lot of your time?
While I suppose you could, you’d need to have very low standards for a life you truly love. If your aspiration was to be a couch potato, you might have a life you love while wasting nearly all of your time. However, on your death-bed, I truly doubt you’ll say you wish you’d put in a little more time on Halo, right?
Where can I apply this in my life?
This is an exercise I’ve done a bunch of times, and each time, I reduced my waste. While I still waste some time, I want to go over a few of the examples from my life. Since we all have different objectives, what I call wasted time might be a vital thing for you.
I used to watch a ton of TV. As my schedule got squeezed by my kids, I started watching less and less, and focusing on things that were entertaining or educational for the kids. While I missed some of the shows, I found the time for the few that really mattered to me.
I used to get dozens of magazines each month. About half were car magazines, and the rest were spread over my other hobbies and areas of interest. I’m down to three each month. I just couldn’t source the time to read them all. Besides, how many articles on rebuilding an engine do you really need to read each year?
Think your way through the last week or two. What are the areas where you spend a lot of time? How important is that particular activity to your enjoyment of your life? Can you cut back a little to make room for something new, or to expand some other aspect of your life?
Grab some paper and make a list of the things you do with your time. Do you get enough sleep, or do you need to make time for a little more of that? Why do I ask about that? How much do you enjoy life when you’re groggy and half asleep? Or do you sleep too much?
What about the TV, reading, hanging out with friends, or any of the other activities you do regularly? Do you have to bowl three nights a week, or could you put one of those evenings to better use at home? Do you need to watch all those TV shows, or could you carve out an hour for another project?
It’s all relative, and it’s your judgement call. What do you value, what gives your life meaning? What makes you love your life? Find those things and make a little more time for them. That means cutting back somewhere.
The quote suggests you find where you are wasting time, and cut there first. I would tend to agree. Momentum can be a difficult thing to overcome, but if you put a little effort in, you can plan out a compelling life.
We all have things that we do that doesn’t bring all that much joy, meaning, or fulfillment to our lives. We want to love our lives. Let’s take a moment and plan a life we will love, and then live it. It is in our hands, even if our free time is very limited.
Examine your life, and then chose wisely what you do with your time.
From: Twitter, @earthXplorer
confirmed at : http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/brucelee384114.html
Photo by sherpas428
Happy Birthday to the late, great master, Bruce Lee, born 27 November 1940.
By the way, Benjamin Franklin shared the same sentiment. He wrote, “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.”
It’s amazing how much time you can “find” by examining how you actually spend your time – that is a great exercise I think everyone should do! I like to think I use my time wisely, but there are probably still some ways I could better fill my time with more things I love, and less time of things I don’t 🙂
That’s the whole point of this blog, to get people to take a moment to pause for a moment and actually look at what they are doing, and make a conscious choice about what they are doing. Thanks for taking the time to examine your life. 8)