Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE
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Use of time
So how do you spend your day? Or put it another way, if you take all the waking hours available to you during the week, how do you devote your time? Clearly it seems I've nothing better to do than calculate some arbitrary numbers that produce nothing except some.....well arbitrary statistics that will get put on one side. But it has taken all of about five minutes to reckon how I use my life on a general day-to-day basis. I thought the exercise may help me see any shortcomings and excesses so I may realise how to adjust it to achieve a better balance.
For instance, it's quite possible to devote most of our time to helping others, looking after the kids, working for a company, housework (if anyone still does any) and then travel time can take up quite a bit. How much time do you actually get that is entirely devoted to yourself for enjoyment and pleasure? How much time do you share with your partner, husband or wife and how much time do you give to your friends? And how much time do you give to just stopping and doing nothing to get some peace and calm into your life?
With just a few minutes calculation I've arrived at some numbers that represent roughly how I spend most of my time on a regular basis (excluding holidays away and special occasions) and the results do not surprise me, however I want to make a few adjustments to make a better balance. I'll share them with you if you can be bothered reading on.
For starters, we all need around 7-8 hours sleep every 24 hours which is a third (yes 33%) of our lives! As we can't do much with those hours except get beauty sleep that refreshes our mind and body, I'll take these hours out of the equation. (It makes sense to have a good quality bed if we sleep so much!)
There are 168 hours in one week and out of that I sleep around 7.5 hours daily including my mid-day nap. So my waking hours number 116 each week. This is roughly how I use them...
47.5 hours at work (although I don't count my Alexander Technique teaching as work because it's more of a vocation and I enjoy it. ......Anyway......
% of week
Work - 9.5 hours daily x 5 days = 47.5 hours - 40%
Eating - 1.5 hours daily = 10.5 - 9%
Social time with my partner and friends - 27%
Travel to/from work - 40 minutes daily - 2%
Violin practice -1.5 hours daily - 9%
Photography - 4%
Reading for leisure - 2%
Bathing and toilet - 2%
TV - around 5 hours per week 4%
Total 99%
The time I calculated for eating does not include dining out with my partner or friend which is more of a social event. I don't have children and if I did, the numbers would look quite different. On looking at this it's clear that I don't have much time for just stopping, meditating or for quiet relaxation. I enjoy being busy and am happiest in activity. But I want to address the balance. I think a little more time to my partner may be appropriate and I'm horrified that my passion for photography has been sidelined by my desire to learn to play the violin, so that would be nice to re-address. I should also stop more often for some quiet contemplation.
My considerations now are, how do I squeeze a few hours a day to write my next book..... Hmm.
You can see that I am not a mathematician or statistician and I have done this very crudely. I'm sure you are far more able than I to calculate this and make more sense of it. But if you haven't got anything better to do or would like to calculate your own use of time then it's easy. Work out how many hours you sleep per night, multiply by 7 and subtract that from 168 hours in the week. Then calculate roughly how many hours you devote to different activities, multiply that number by 100 then divide by your total weekly waking hours to get the %.
i.e. No. hours in an activity x 100, divided by no. of waking hours a week = %
Ooh la la, how the time flies by when you're busy! :-)
