Be Intentional With Your Time
This is the last post in the series 17 Strategies for Becoming the Best Version of Yourself. We’ve covered a lot of ground and discussed a lot of different ideas, and, for this final installment of the series, I want to share with you one last piece of advice for how to reach your full potential. This final word is really not the last in a line, but it’s instead the throughline that’s been running through the whole series. Being intentional with your time is the undercurrent of every piece of advice I’ve offered to you. It plays into everything you do. Time spent preparing, traveling, mingling, reading, creating, and resting, is all significant. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf tells Frodo, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us,” so, to close out the 17 Strategies series, here are four reminders to help you do just that.
Realize Whose Time It Is
In previous posts, I’ve mentioned how important my Christian faith is to my life, and this piece of advice is helpfully illustrated by a story that Jesus tells in the Bible about a master and his servants. (Matthew 25:14-30) The story goes that the master of the house was leaving on a long journey, and before he leaves, he entrusts three of his servants with portions of his wealth. When the master returns, he finds that two of his servants have used the money that he gave them to turn a profit and increase the wealth. To those faithful servants, the master gives a great reward. The third servant, however, chose instead to bury his portion of the master’s money in the ground until he returned. This servant receives no reward and is sent away for failing to make good use of what he was given. While this story is part of a larger point that Jesus is making in the book of Matthew, for our discussion it serves as an important reminder that our time is not our own. Our time, like our money and other resources, has been given to us, and it is our responsibility to spend it well. We should be like the good servants who used what they were given to invest and reap rewards. We cannot become the best version of ourselves if we hoard our time, clinging to it as our own possession, or if we carelessly throw it all away. Our time is not our right but a gift, and the sooner you realize that the faster you will learn to let go of anxiety and to take responsibility.
Don’t Waste It
Life is short. Everybody says it, but that’s because it’s so easy to forget. On our best days, we feel like we’ll live forever, but the truth is that all of our lives are passing by painfully fast and none of us know how much time we actually have left. In the story about those three servants, each one is given a different amount of money, but they were all given the same task – to make it count. We don’t know how much time we will be given. Some people today still live to see 100, while others never make it out of their teens. It’s a sobering reality, but it’s an important one for us to grapple with from time to time. Like Hamlet, famously reflecting on human mortality as he gazes at a skull, we can’t truly be intentional with our time unless we remind ourselves that it will one day be over. I share this piece of advice not to be morbid but to be mindful. The best lives are ones that are lived with the end in mind. You only have so long to live, so live to the fullest. You’ve taken the first step by pursuing self-improvement and now it’s time to make every moment count.
Use It Wisely
So if you’re not going to waste the time you’ve been given, the alternative is to use it wisely. How do you do that? Wisely spending your time is very similar to wisely spending your money. If you want to spend your money responsibly, you must choose which expenses are most important and then work your way down from there. Spending your time responsibly is no different! Determine what in your life is most important to you – what motivates you and gives you that spark and determination to keep going – and spend your time pursuing those things. What you choose to do with your time may be different from what I choose to do with mine, but that’s not a bad thing. If you know your priorities, your responsibilities, your goals, and where you find joy, then you already know how to spend your time wisely. And spending your time wisely will set you well on your way to becoming the best version of yourself.
Take Time to Be
This is the last piece of advice in this, the last installment of the 17 Strategies series, and it’s a simple one. We’ve used a lot of verbs in this series. Cultivate. Develop. Optimize. But perhaps the most important verb is the one that commands us to be. In all our efforts to improve ourselves and reach our goals, it’s all too easy to forget to be present. Focusing so much on where we want to go, we can lose sight of where we are right now. So I encourage you, don’t get so caught up in the future that you miss out on the here and now, because there’s probably a whole lot of good in your life already. We definitely don’t want to waste our lives, but we also don’t want to be so busy with our big plans that we miss our lives completely. So before you start becoming the best version of yourself – and all along the way – take some time to just be here.
And there you have it. The end of the 17 Strategies series! If you’ve missed any of the stops along the way, check out those previous posts! Thanks for coming along for the ride, and good luck in your own pursuit of living a better, richer life.
