Sometimes I do my best thinking when I've been drinking. This is usually for that creative stuff. I do my "solving the world's problems" style thinking during my sanity time,like on a bike where I can't get interrupted by much of anything. As long as the roads are consistent and relatively unchanging, I can really get a lot of thoughts moved around. For a while now I've had the beginnings of a theory of how to be better than average. It's foundation probably lies in activity or activities. The root of which is how we spend our time. Some of our great social thinkers have got me thinking on this. I don't know if it was Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, Dale Carnegie, or Norman Vincent Peale who once said something along the lines of "figure out what everybody else is doing and do the opposite." I've really tried to figure out how this applies to a lot of situations. It's kind of tough because I wasn't raised that way.
The other day it occurred to me how many hours are in a average work week. For most of us, it's 40. Forty didn't really seem like a very big number to me so I did some thinking on it. For the first 3 1/2 months of the year I had been working a second job so I was actually putting in about 60 hours a week. When the seasonal work was over it seemed like I had a ton of extra time on my hands. Go to work at 8AM leave for home at 5PM Monday thru Friday. Saturday and Sunday off work. I tend to sleep about 6-7 hours a night. Sometimes less, sometimes more, but 6-7 is about the average. OK, so those are my biggest 'scheduled' obligations. I say they are 'scheduled' obligations because I am required to work because the government has an insatiable appetite for my money. As much as I would rather be doing something other than sleeping, my body seems to require it. So here's the math:
AVAILABLE HOURS:
+ 24 hours a day
x 7 days a week
= 168 hours in a week
+ 8 to 5
= 9 hours of work
x 5 days a week
= 45 hours a week
SLEEPING:
+ 7 hours of sleep
x 7 days a week
= 49 hours a week
COMBINED OBLIGATIONS:
+ 45 working hours
+ 49 sleeping hours
= 94 hours of 'scheduled' obligations
NET AVAILABLE HOURS:
+168 hours in a week
- 94 hours of scheduled obligations
= 74 hours per week left for anything and everything else
74 hours is a lot of time...that's a TON of time. That's almost 2 more full 'work weeks' of leftover time. Now I realize all work and no play makes for a miserable life. But that still seems like an awful lot of spare time. So I tried to find some relevant statistics on the topic. The government, in their infinite wisdom has a department for just such a thing. They tax the life out of you and then with the money they take from you they start a division of the government to figure out how you spend your time coming up with the money are taking from you. As far as I'm concerned, the accuracy of the numbers would be better reflected by the name "Office of the Numbers I Just Made Up".
Now those hours in the calculation above don't account for how much time is spent cooking, commuting, etc. etc. It's just the leftover time after the big stuff. It seems like an awful lot of extra time every week. How do you spend all of your extra time? How average are you? It seems that if you wanted to be better than average, talent aside, then you probably need to spend more than the average amount of time at a particular activity or endeavor. If you wanted to be better at cooking, finances, have prettier yard, etc. it probably could be done by spending more time at it. I realize this idea doesn't sound very profound. But I didn't realize that, on average, only 26.7% of our time is spent at work. Looking at it like this, the work/life balance seems a little tilted to our advantage as it is.
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