Do You Pass Or Use Time?

In a typical day, what do you do with your allotment of time? Your day and everyone else's has 86,400 seconds, 1440 minutes. No days, weeks, minutes or seconds can be stored for future use like dollars put away in the bank.

A friend of mine recently told me of her renewed appreciation for time, when after going through months of chemotherapy she learned that she was cancer free. My friend told that she no longer begins to look forward to weekends on Wednesday, but rather, savors the joys and opportunities each day brings.

It is easy to become consumed by your routine as the calendar pages keep flipping. Sometimes it takes a traumatic death or illness in the family or another major life change to shock us into realizing how quickly our time is passing and to evaluate what we do with it.

Here's a technique that may help:

Take a piece of lined paper and draw seven columns, one for each day of the week. In one hour increments, list the 24 hours of each day down the left margin of the page. Write the days of the week at the top of each column. In each one hour blank, write what you did with your time during the past week. Colored pens will help distinguish between various types of activities.

After you have filled in the blanks, review the table to determine how you spent the time you no longer have. How much was spent on what you had to do? On what you wanted to do? How much was spent doing things without giving any thought to what you were doing? How much time did you spend watching TV? Working? Sleeping? How much time did you spend with your spouse and children?

Now use this form to plan what you are going to do with your time next week. What do you plan to change? How can you better spend you time to achieve your goals, to enrich your family life, to develop as a person?

Whenever I think about how I use my time, I recall the words of a nationally recognized author and psychologist that I once heard speak. As he reflected on his experiences in counseling terminally ill patients in their final hours before death, he recalled that in their last conversations, "None of them ever said they wished they had put in more time at the office."

As we're nearing the end of 2006 and a new year approaches it's the right time to reflect and evaluate what you are doing with your time, because it is the most valuable possession your have.