There’s an article on Lifehack today which shows you how to add more hours to the day. Now, I love this Site for all it’s interesting posts on how to improve your life, but this post bothers me a little.

The article suggests things like taking informational reading and instead quickly “skimming” the text to get what you want out of it, and getting rid of relationships that use up too much of your time compared to what you get out of it. Another suggestion is to conduct meetings standing up in order to “speed them up”.

Now, I’m all for reclaiming some of my 24 hours each day, but it seems like the suggestions here are about multitasking to the point of insanity! I don’t want to hold meetings standing up, and I don’t want to skim a book that I’m reading in order to learn something. How much am I going to miss because I’ve hurried through the book? I think a better way to add more hours to your day is to examine what you absolutely love- what inspires you- and make time to do that each day. If you can’t fit everything in each day, then select a time slot that allows you to rotate different things in. For instance, say you decide that from 4:00 to 5:00 pm each day you will utilize that time to get chores done. This could be anything from light cleaning to grabbing groceries. Then you also reserve 7:00 to 8:00 pm each night for your free time. That could be reading your favorite book to going to the gym or watching your favorite show. Is this too structured? Then think about what will happen to your life if you were to not get EVERYTHING done that day. Would it fall apart? Would it end? Not likely. So, relax. Breath! Get what you can get done and focus on the things that inspire you and fill you with gratitude and passion.

You DON’T have to do everything all the time! In fact, I think the goal should be slowing yourself down enough to be able to at least realize that your life will NOT end if you don’t accomplish a billion things each day. Where’s the quality in life in multitasking in line, at the store, while you’re cooking, etc? Can’t we just enjoy cooking a nice dinner and use that time to reflect and appreciate what we’re doing at that moment? Can’t we enjoy a great book about improving our love life without feeling like we have to hurry to finish the chapter because we’re in line at the post office?

I know there’s a lot to get done, but imagine yourself many years from now reflecting on your life. Will you say to yourself, “Wow! I got a lot done. I might have ran around like crazy but at least I was efficient” or will you say “Wow. My life was abundant. I truly enjoyed every moment and savored them as if they were the last moments I was going to live on Earth”. For me, I hope that I will be saying the latter.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!