How to Protect and Focus Your Energy Wisely

Your time isn’t infinite and everyone wants it

With the rise of social media and the app economy, companies have shifted their focus from your wallet to your time and attention. They know that if they own your attention, they’ll have more chances to get your money later anyway. They also know that if they dominate your time, publishers and advertisers will spend anything to be where you are.

Time is the new currency

The average American spends more than 10 hours each day staring at some screen. I’m sure this varies a bit by age, geography, and occupation. But, I know that my social and work circles spend a helluva lot more than 10 hours a day on their devices.

We all talk about the important things we want to accomplish in our lives. We want to work out and be healthier. We want to spend more time with the people who matter the most to us. We want to travel to amazing places and create memories. We want to write that bestselling novel that we keep promising ourselves that we will publish someday. We want to escape the 9–5 grind at a reasonable point in our lives, and finally be able to do those things we always put on the back burner. But, somehow we end up scrolling through our favorite social feed and put it all off for another day.

Facebook, YouTube, and SnapChat eat up the majority of your time. We probably knows this, given how we spend our days with our phones in our hands. But, we probably don’t realize how much this adds up month after month, and over the years.

Dollars for your Time

So, while companies are lining up to spend money to be where you spend your time, your employer is also convincing you to trade your time for money. That’s essentially what we do as employees. We give up our time, which actually represents slices of our life, in return for money.

Tim Urban of Wait But Why has this excellent visualization of how the average American life is spent in weeks. It is rather sobering to mark off the boxes of your life like this. You really start to realize what a scarce and precious resource you are giving away with your daily decisions. The lion’s share of those little boxes is dedicated to your career. Now, you may understand why I dedicate myself to helping people make the most of that big red section.

Spending your Life

When you spend the money that you have received for your time, you are buying something with your life. I don’t think we often visualize it that way, but that’s what we’re doing. We trade our life for things.

For example:

• The average household income in the U.S. in 2015 was $55,775.
• The average new car price in 2015 was $33,560.

This means that the average household will have to spend 60% of its annual income to buy a new car. Do people do that? Yes, of course they do. About 17.5 million vehicles were purchased just in the U.S. in 2016. But, the reality is that this probably isn’t a cash transaction. It will be a loan, which means that car will end up costing even more, but I’m not going to even factor that in.

Now, assuming that someone works 8 hour days for 50 weeks of the year (accounting for the average 10 days of vacation time) to earn that $55,775, that means that they spent roughly 1200 hours of their life to buy that car. Think of that as 7 months, or 30 weeks, or 150 days of work carved out of the precious remaining time in your life just to buy a new car.

But, that doesn’t account for the time spent commuting to work and back. I’ll be kind and only assume a half hour drive to work (I wish!), and the time rises to a more realistic 1350 hours of life used to buy that car. Those hours are the equivalent of 56 days of life energy.

I’m not a full-fledged minimalist yet, but over the past decade I’ve started thinking a lot harder about what I buy. Being an independent business owner is part of this revelation. You do think a lot more deeply about how money flows in and out of your business. I do know that you need to treat your career as a business, whether you are an entrepreneur or not.

But, it really has been the realization that the money I earn is typically related directly to my time and the remaining boxes of my life that I had to trade to get that money. Is some new purchase really worth time from my short life? Is that nice new toy worth more than reinvesting that time to buy my own freedom? Does a retailer or manufacturer deserve that money more than my children do?

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My time and energy is too precious to spend without thinking more deeply than I used to about such things. And my money is often the outcome of trading my time and energy, so it is almost as precious. There are more important things that I want to accomplish in the time that remains in my life. We all have amazing things that we can bring to this world, if we can reduce the distractions.

It is critical that you fiercely protect your time and focus your remaining energy if you want to achieve the big goals in your life, before all of the meaningless little demands chew them up.

Defend and Focus

You may have already realized that you would rather spend your precious time accomplishing great things. That’s fantastic! But, if you’re anything like me, you come up with dozens of exciting ideas and you want to tackle them all. It’s tempting to have a huge list of ambitious to-do items. However, nothing slows you down more than spreading your attention and energy too thin.

We all think that we can multitask and accomplish more in less time. It makes us feel good to be so productive. But, the reality is that human beings fail at successfully dividing our attention. Not only are we poor multi-taskers, we tend to get stuck in a rut of “doing” and being busy, without really thinking about the “why.”

What is the point of rushing only to arrive at the wrong destination?

A lack of clear purpose, vague goals, and diffusion of effort all lead to either quick progress towards a meaningless destination, or slower progress towards the goal that really matters. Defending your precious time, energy, and resources is only the first step. The next critical step is to now take your precious pool of resources and tightly focus them on accomplishing a singular objective.

Of course we will have numerous tasks and smaller goals that have to be accomplished in our lives each year. That’s normal and it’s the price we pay to be someone who wants some semblance of a reasonable life. Most of us aren’t willing to lug a typewriter up to some mountain cabin and refuse to leave until our great novel is written.

But you should strictly prioritize your tasks and goals, so that one rises to the top above the others and becomes your north star. What is the most important thing that you want to accomplish before the end of the year? How can you align your daily activities to support that? How will you fiercely protect the time required every day and every week to ensure success? There are few things more powerful than a focused person with an intense drive to achieve a singular goal.

Use your calendar to dedicate time and protect it for the things that really matter. I block off time on my calendar for the things that I know I need to be productive. That includes regular exercise, breaks to recharge, time in nature, dinner with my family, and a reasonable amount of sleep. But, most importantly, it also includes dedicated blocks of time to write every day, since my primary north star goal is to finish writing my book.

As a multipotentialite, I know how easily I can be distracted. I know that I could let a multitude of small tasks and activities eat away at my day. I can go off on a tangent learning how to build some new DIY project and end up watching YouTube videos for hours.

I’ve experienced this many times in my own life. It’s easy to get into what I like to call a “spinning plates” state. A whole bunch of tasks and responsibilities demand a little bit of your attention, otherwise they come crashing down. So you rush around trying to keep each plate happily spinning, but really not achieving anything meaningful.

It requires saying “no” to others. But, it also requires saying no to yourself and letting some things go. Some of your projects just have to be shelved, no matter how much you love them.

As I mentioned above, I use scheduled appointments on my daily calendar to maintain focus. But, my daily journal is another technique that helps me focus my energy on the few things that matter each day. Every night, I write down three tasks that I want to focus on and accomplish the next day.

When I wake up in the morning, I review those three tasks and clear my mind of anything else that tries to intrude. I keep a list in Evernote to capture ideas, article concepts, or other tasks when they pop into my head. I jot them down, but immediately go back to the big 3 for the day (no matter how tempting it is to squeeze in some new little thing).

We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. Meanwhile, idiots focus on marginal productivity hacks and gains while they leak out energy each passing day. — Ryan Holiday

Once you become very clear with your north star goal and your overall purpose, you can focus all of your time and energy on achieving it. As Tim Urban’s visualization makes abundantly clear, we have fewer life boxes left than we think.

Be ruthless in your decision making around those boxes. Who and what deserves to claim one and fill it in each day? That is not a decision that should be left up to someone else. It is absolutely your most precious resource and only you should decide how they get spent.

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