Time is perishable.

What we get in the morning lasts for that day only.

Nothing to take home or put in the bag.

We know this.

We also know that we claim to work long hours to ourselves and to the boss. Often we have work to show for it – lines of code, words on a page, so many calls, these many meetings.

We are smart so we train ourselves to do the work in a fraction of total work hours. We do it around email checks, feed scroll and YouTube safari. These are our pre and post work rituals. Because we need to warm up for the work and we deserve a reward for 2 hours of work.

Challenge is when these pre and post work rituals take 4 hours for 2 hours of work.

Breaks are important and we should have guilt-free rest and fun built into our days. But when we put our mind in the control of devices jumping from text to picture to video, there is no relaxation. Even worse, when we do this scrolling in the name of learning. In both cases, we load our minds and hoard information fearing what if I need it later.

This is fine if you are okay with mediocrity. If you have dreams of transcending your current state then you need to be mindful of its effects.

The choice is yours.

You can choose to delete 4 hours of your lives on a feed safari. If you think about it, It’s more than a month lost for 200 days of work in a year.

Or, you can still go on a feed safari but instead of 4 do it for 2 hours.

You can use 2 hours you save as a surplus and invest parts of it in self care (nap or walk), building bonds (family and friends). You can also make yourself more valuable by practicing a soft or hard skill. Here are the ones that matter in 2019.

Do you want to do it but not able to due to old habits? Check out this guide then.

The Simple Guide to Creating New Habits for a Great 2019

A good starting point is to remind yourself about the ephemeral nature of time.

Create buckets of rest, fun, work and learning in your day. Keep your devices away when resting. Rethink what you do for fun. If you are not bored chances are you will find it easy to do the work that matters.

You’ll fail on some days but that’s ok. We all do. Keep trying.

How do you plan to use your surplus?