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My Best Advice To You
last edited Sunday, May 15,
2005, 12:44 PM Central Daylight
Savings Time
Q. How Do I make the best
use of my time?
A. Wouldn't you like to know:
Do you really know what time it is right now?
What time did you eat breakfast? 8:16 AM or 11:25 AM?
How many hours of every day do I read?
How many hours each day do I generally watch television?
We often don't really keep track of our time and worse, we waste lots
of it!
Somehow it seems a bit anal retentive or obsessive
compulsive to be taking account
or count of every second of our lives ya know what I mean? I don't
really. But, in
retrospect, just like the dieter counts calories the person who is not
really in control of their free time and seemingly doesn't have the
time to do the things they want to do after they have done all the
things they think they have to do needs to count seconds, or minutes or
at least, hours!
If you are the kind of person who likes to wake up every morning and
get the necessary things out of the way first, then you are probably a
amateur time manager.
If you are up at 7 one morning and then up at 10 the next even on your
days off, then you probably don't have an alarm clock or your own hours
fluctuate like staying up too late some nights watching too much
television.
I have trouble sometimes, keeping track of the due date on my books and
dvds I checked out at the local library. You never want to be late with
that stuff. Late fees take up more money and certainly, more time!
I often get exasperated while standing in grocery lines especially at
Wal*Mart Super Center stores. The lines in grocery stores in general
are long. It's best to be psychologically ready for it. Plan ahead. Let
them know you'll be back in 2 hours, not in just a half hour. That way
you will always arrive after shopping at the super market earlier than
expected. You must figure in the time to unload and store away all your
little goodies after you get out of your car in your driveway.
The thing is, nobody has taken time lately that I know of to figure in
how many hours they spend just going out to the store, get gas at the
pump, stop by the post office, then on the way back home stop over at
George's for a short visit and exchange lottery information.
You could if you actually did the following:
Carry with you a small spiral
notebook and write down the time before your trip and the time
after
your trip, and note the many things you do and places you go on each
trip. You can also occassionally check the oil and transmission levels.
LOL.
If at the end of about a month you can figure in how many minutes or
even hours or worse, days, that you spend shopping and visiting George
and waiting at red lights and slowing down for funerals and ambulances
and pedestrians jay walking at every corner, then you may then
calculate how much of this is what you want to be doing and how much is
just a waste of your valuable time. Your time is valuable, by the way!
Your thoughts are important so
don't hesitate to carry a second spiral notebook
for: adding your ideas and thoughts and recording important
events and other stuff for your future reference.
I do. I try to write down when my favorite tv shows will air so I will
not miss them, hopefully, and the names of books that I may never read
but may browse through from the library.
You never know when you want to remember and you just can not do so.
Taking notes is a tedious but good habit if you want to manage your
time better!
If I see there's a show that lasts about an hour and my wife wants to
watch it although I don't really like it that much, I manage my time by
getting off my dairy air and rush into the kitchen and always am able
to find dishes that need washing or that need drying and putting back
into the cabinets. I don't use an electrical dishwasher, also a good
time saver, but I like to get my hands in the warm soap and just take
my time, and do a thorough job. I don't care if it takes an hour. I do
it because it kills the time I would already have wasted watching a tv
show I hate plus it gets something done now that neither of us will
have to do later!
Go all day or all week without
television, (Cable, DVD, VHS, TEEVO)
Instead: watch several good books. Read!
Then after a month you take note of all the books you have read, if
any, hopefully I have not just spent the last week counting the
floaters in my eyes! Then you can say to yourself, If I had not read
these books I would have still been watching mindless tv and I would
always be wondering what these books were about, the ones that have
been setting on our book shelves these past 20 years! Then if you are
tired of books after a few weeks or a month, you can resume watching
soaps and news.
By the way, even if you mis a few months of some soaps,
you can play catchup by reading the highlights on line and just pick up
with the script once you start watching again, yep. Sheridan still
thinks she can convince Louise that Beth stole her baby and John Abbott
will
sometime in the far future forgive Mike and Kevin's mother for not
telling him the truth before they were married.
These soaps are so slow that by the time John
McBaine decides he is really in love with Natalie. You watch for
instance,
General Hospital and wonder if Nicholas really has an evil twin
brother.
Or The Young and The Restless where Drewcilla defies her daughter
Lilly to go any where near Daniel,
who due to being drunk at the party and fell asleep in the back seat of
his car was arrested and blamed for a young girl's injuries; Cassie,
who in fact
just happened to forget what happened, as it were she removed his keys
from his clothes pocket while he lay there unconscious and, under age
as she was and an inexperienced driver just drove herself and a
sleeping Daniel into a ravine, placing the blame on Daniel/
You get to see what really happens, but the actors and actresses only
get the little peices of the puzzle. The only one who at the onset, the
get go, understood and did not in fact blame Daniel but thought he was
driving the car at the time was one of the few adults who gave Daniel
some slack was Damien.
Now from this you can tell I have been paying some attention. I have
been watching all of the following television shows as follows with
regularity as if an obsession!
All My Children, One Life To
Live, Passions, The Young And The Restless,
but about a year ago, while in a deep depression I watched
these additionally:
The Bold And The Beautiful, The
Guiding Light, As The World Turns, General Hospital.
I mean we recorded all these and watched them until late
at night!
How? We have 3 VHS VCR units in series using the coax cable going in to
the first VCR in and out to VCR2 in, and out to VCR3 and then out to TV.
We could additionally watch live television on a 4th channel so as not
to miss Oprah and other shows of interrest to us at the time. Kind of a
low budget TEEVO!
It wasn't possible for me to bother adding anything to my web site due
to the time constraints. And after watching 8 soaps a day or day and
night, I was wasted!
I forgot most of what I watched any way! That's what happens when you
are half awake and half asleep. But on days we decided to watch some
Video taped movies or documentaries checked out recently from the
library we would sometimes have to stay up as late as 3:30 AM in the
pre dawn hours past midnight to do all that.
I got shell shock from too much tv saturation. Well, It was apparent
that neither of us were making good use of our time. If you have
something to do, or nothing at all to do, don't just spend all your
free time watching too much television. It can turn you into a tv
addict!
TV is a drug, but it hasn't been registered with the FDA yet. :)
If you have a need to mowe the lawn and it hasn't been cut in over a
month (and the rain the day before has made it look more like a small
jungle for lizards and squirrels.) LOL!
then you really need to set up some priorities, like, do I want to
watch tv. or do I want to pay a city citation? Do I want to hear the
loud rumble of the motor and get grass in my nose or do I want to wait
until tomorrow when it might just storm again? You know it ends up you
finally cut the lawn, but only after hours of procrastination, which is
time wasted in negative thinking.
I tend to do that quite a lot!
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