Sunday, March 24, 2013

Time Channels: Which Trees Bear Fruit?

The purpose of looking at time channels, or what I will refer to as "time trees", is to categorize what we are spending time on and how valuable that time tree is. Of course, everyone is going to have different trees, and for different reasons, so all of these examples are basic, but applicable.

TIME TREE EXAMPLES

Tree: Sleeping
  Branch: Maintains Health
  Branch: Rejuvenates
  Branch: Accelerates Most Healing
  Branch: Increases productvitiy

Time Study A: Work, Sleep, Gaming

This second post is the first post in a series of time studies. Study A will include looking at a life where sleep, work, and gaming are the three main time points of life. Luckily not everyone in the world fits this category, but enough do in our current society to look closer.

Based on the first post, we can assume that on average one will sleep 8 hours a day, and work 5.7 hours a day to average out the week. In this study, we are going to add in an average of 5 hours a day on any kind of entertainment platform. This could get more complicated if we consider the fact that gamers stay up extremely late on the weekends, vacations, etc. Assuming just five hours a day, which isn't that far off when looking at individuals even still in high school, 5 hours a day would amount to just under 21% of your life.

If we use the 56.75% figure from work and sleep, and 21% from gaming, that makes up 77.75% of your entire usable time. That leaves a mere 22.25% left for family, studying and or self improvement, exercise, church, charity, and whatever else composes your world.

In my life, I have played several games, and I have also been an even worse representation than the number above. If you hardly sleep, work just enough to live, and dedicate the rest of your time to video games, you are spending even more of your time on something that has no relative value in the world. Video games cannot leave a legacy, change the world, create beautiful works of art, nor create lifelong experiences that turn into stories told years after you are gone. We are all given the same twenty four hours in one day. How are you going to use yours?

**More posts to come!**

An Introduction

In today's modern society, people still face the challenge of insatiability. Sure, technology has changed, communication has changed, and the moral compass of the world has definitely shifted more south, but in light of that, we humans still have insatiable desires that won't ever change.



in·sa·tia·ble  

/inˈsāSHəbəl/
Adjective
(of an appetite or desire) Impossible to satisfy: "an insatiable hunger".
Synonyms
insatiate - voracious - greedy - unquenchable


For some individuals, money and power is everything, while other people couldn't be happier as long as there's beer in the fridge. As time goes by, we continuously forget that money, beer, social status, friends, family, vacations, cars, houses, looks, our childrens' accomplishments, and workplace satisfaction still isn't enough to satisfy that empty space we can't seem to fill.

As time goes by, emotions change, as we feel older and more responsible to be accomplished and successful. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you start wealthy with little responsibility, you are more in a place of purpose seeking or living up to, and finding your way may be more challenging.

What we need to realize now, is that there is one common currency that we all share, and no matter what you do, you cannot gain more of it. That currency is time.

Researchers at the Wharton School of Business did an extensive thesis on time as a valuable commodity, but we will not go into the mathematical models here on this blog. My purpose is to awaken a desire in every one of you that constantly poses the question of "how am I spending my time?"

Let's say that your doctor told you (based on your heredity) that you are expected to live until the ripe old age of 86. While this cannot be determined by man, you can use that or several other things to try and get a good idea of how much time you have left. Now don't get me wrong, this post is not to scare you into thinking about death, but rather to challenge you to look at how you are spending your time.

If you knew you had one more hour to live, versus sixty five more years, sure, you would spend your time differently, but how you spend your time overall dictates the odds of you passing away while doing something meaningful.

#1 Sleep

You may have heard of similar studies being done, but if we assume that the average person sleeps anywhere from six to ten hours a day, this gives us an average of 8 hours a day merely sleeping. There will be deviations when you are a newborn, if you get sick, if work demands less sleep, and the like, but for all intensive purposes we will use that number 8. If you sleep an average of 8 hours a day, and there are only 24 hours in one day, you are literally sleeping 33% of your life. That leaves 67% of your time to be spent on work, school, entertainment, and everything else you spend time doing.

#2 Work

The next big category that we cannot avoid looking at is work. Given the current unemployment situation, we know that some people have more time than others, and more choices with that time. If we assume that everyone in the world works 40 hours a week, 5 days a week, that winds up being 5.7 hours a day averaging through one entire week. This ends up being around 23.75% of our total time, until we retire or cease to work for other reasons. So far, taking sleep and work into consideration, we have already decided how to spend 56.75% of our lives. Can you imagine having over 56% of your time already cashed out if you sleep on a normal schedule and work a full-time job?

**Continued next post.**