Make it count

Life is short. No matter how much you cram into each day, you still won't manage to do all the things that you could do or even all those things you might want to do. In some way this is sad. But it is also part of the beauty of life: you give the things that you do value by not doing the countless things you could do instead. So how do you best spend your time?

An idea that I have been grappling with for a while is to make your time count in multiple categories. What do I mean by that? Well there are many different categories to spend your time. Some sample categories for spending your time are: family and friends, exercise, work, hobbies and mental health. Any given activity can fall in one or multiple categories. Let's take running for example. If you despise running and it makes you angry it would simply fall into the category of exercise. If you like running, it makes you feel good, relaxes your mind and you do it with a friend of yours, it would fall into multiple categories: exercise, hobbies, mental health as well as family and friends.

If you're like most people, you want to spend a significant amount of time in several categories. You want to build great relationships with your family. You want to have deep and meaningfull friendships. You want to exercise so that you are healthy. You want to work hard to build something meaningfull. You want to do some things just for the pleasure of doing them. And of course you want to stay sane while doing all of those things.

Here's where the trade offs come into play: you only have 24 hours a day and spending time in one category usually reduces the time you can spend in another category. When you are working out, you can't create a customer presentation. Or when you're playing with your infant child, you can't deadlift at the same time.

So how do you best deal with this situation? In my opinion the best way to solve this dilemma is to spend time in multiple categories. Here are some examples:

• Working with friends: you work and spend time with friends, presumably on something that you like. This could fall into the categories work, friends and hobbies.
• Sharing hobbies with your family: you spend time with your family and pursue your hobby. This falls into the categories family and hobbies.
• Exercising with friends: you work on your health and spend time with friends. These are just some examples. The list could go on and on.

What's important here is, that I don't recommend multitasking. I am not recommending, that you do E-Mails while having a meeting, that you listen to a podcast while having a conversation with your kid or that you listen to an audiobook on noise cancelling headphones while riding a bicycle. I actually discourage you from doing that. There has been a large amount of research indicating that it is really harmful to multitask (or rather multifocus). What I mean is that you do one and only one single thing at any given time. If you plan the activity wisely and frame it in a good manner, this single task can serve multiple purposes.

Don't overdo this though. You're really doing more harm than good, if you're trying to force every activity to serve multiple purposes. As with everything in life, this idea is a matter of balance. If some of the activities you do serve multiple purposes, it can be really fun and save you time.

Some examples in my life are my job where I work with friends on a project that started off as a hobby on the weekends. I do submission grappling, which is a great workout with awesome people, that really resets my mind after a hard day. And I really like taking walks with my family and playing with my son.

So to summarize this article: If you want to maximize your time you can do activities that serve multiple purposes. When doing this, keep in mind that every activity should be one specific thing and not contain multitasking. Don't overdo it and have fun doing whatever it is that you do. That's it. Enjoy!