My Simple Community

August 29, 2010

Time is at the heart of everything. If someone asks you “What’s new?” and it’s possible to tell them you may not be doing enough with your life. Maybe it’s time to take inventory of how you spend your time. I often find my to-do list considerably heavier than the weight of hours I have to invest against it. And I think I get stuck or end up doing less valuable things because I think too much about a variety of things on the list that exist with varying time requirements – some take minutes, others take months; some are needed now, others in years.

Every day we have 24 hours in front of us, every week 168. When was the last time you thought about how your typical day or week goes, where the time goes? As a researcher, I most enjoy studying the use of time. I find it fascinating how important time is but how unconscious we are to how we use it. Can you imagine taking a job without knowing how much you would be paid? We certainly focus on where our money comes from and where it goes, but give little thought to our time.

From my research, the typical American believes they have between 2-3 hours a day of uncommitted time or “free time.”  In reality, when you analyze how they actually spent their time, the average is closer to six hours a day or 42 hours a week – the same amount of time associated with a full time job. That means we are losing track of about four hours a day.  There is nothing wrong with that.

I just want to suggest time is your greatest asset. But getting a handle on how you are spending it you will gain great insight on your priorities.  It doesn’t matter how you think you spend your time or what you say you do with your time. How you actually spend your time tells you what is important.

Feeling stuck? Take inventory. Start a spreadsheet or make a list of hours in the day. Break it into 15 minute intervals. Include all 24 hours – some people are stunned with what they do in the middle of the night. Then commit to write down the dominant activity of every 15 minute period. One day will be insightful.  For some, after a few days they have learned enough to see patterns in time they didn’t expect, for others it takes a week or more. But I assure you, you WILL be surprised and it will be worth the time invested to do it.

What does this have to do with community?  The biggest reason we have for not doing things is “I don’t have time.”  Well, guess what, you do.

June 26, 2010

What do you need to invest in order to accomplish the things that are important to you? As a generalization in America, I would say we turned to money, first, as the way to accomplish most things between the years of 1950 to 2000.  We bought it. Plain and simple.

Money is scarce today. For most, it will be scarce for quite a while. So how do we get things done now? Even if you are millions of dollars in debt you have exactly the same amount of one resource as the richest person on Earth. No matter who you are or what your condition, you get exactly 24 hours in a day.  You have time. And, I believe, time has always been the most important source of wealth – even in the years Americans bought most of what they wanted. Because when you die (sorry for the morbid thought) your time on Earth is done along with everything you accumulated.

So today, even if you have no money or are severely in debt, you have tremendous wealth in the 24 hours of this day. Ordinarily I would have said that time is enough to accomplish whatever you need. But I no longer believe that.

Among the many ways technology has changed our lives perhaps the most powerful is the exponential increase in the speed with which we produce larger quantities, varieties, and new iterations of literally everything. It is impossible to fully experience anything anymore because there are so many options.  As a result, the biggest challenge, the largest obstacle to accomplishing any goal beyond yourself is getting the attention of other people you need to engage to make it work. You need to get their attention to get their time. You need their time to get money.

As long as your goals are personal – having nothing to do with the time of others – attention can be managed. That said, have you noticed how hard it is to keep focused on anything you do? There are so many other things bumping into your thought process to divert your attention – even when it’s JUST YOU doing whatever you are doing. It’s hard to pay attention.

Then extend that to doing things with others. How do you get their attention? I think the key to success is getting and sustaining the attention of others.

Many would say this post is too long, that I lost the attention of most after 25 words. Ironically, I continue to write even though I know that is true.  Of the hundreds of millions of blogs and websites that exist, a handful of people come here. Of that handful, maybe ten percent read the whole thing.

Simple Community is really two short books in one – each 70 pages. That’s really short. Though thousands have been sold, I don’t know ten people who have read the whole thing!  By the way, people are buying the book, they just aren’t reading it all. My next book will be no more than 50 pages.

If you are doing anything that requires others, the two questions you must answer are: how do I get their attention, and how do I keep it?  Good luck with that.

While you may feel pressed and like you are unable to get everything done – I certainly feel that way most of the time – you HAVE time.

You don’t waste it. It just gets away from you.

There are 168 hours in a week. If you work and travel to get to work for 60 hours a week (and I bet you don’t), that still leaves 108 hours. If you sleep 8 hours a day, that still leaves 52 hours in a week (and you are sleeping well with 8 a day!).

Fifty-two hours a week to eat and such is a little over 7 hours a day.

Do you really do chores for 7 hours a day?

We have time.

We just don’t think much about how we use it.  You can do something about that.

You have a computer. You probably have a spreadsheet program like Excel.  Along the first column enter the hours of a day starting with midnight. Do it in 15 minute blocks 12:00, 12:15, 12:30 and so on all the way down to midnight. Then for a day, a few days, a week, write down what you did during all of those quarter hours. When you finish, you will learn some amazing things about your time. If you do this for a week, it will take no more than two of those quarter hours to enter what you did and maybe another 15 minutes to ponder what it means, but it may change the way you think of - and invest – your time for life.

I’ll even save you some time. Email me at mail@mycommunity.com and I’ll send you an excel spreadsheet ready to go.

Time is the fuel of community.

As I was drinking my morning coffee this morning I looked out the window and across the street my neighbor was loading his pickup truck to go to work while another neighbor, who was in the process of walking her dog, stopped to chat and a third neighbor joined the conversation.

Three neighbors taking a moment.

Nobody put it on the calendar, it isn’t a scheduled event, but around here neighbors stop all the time to be… just neighborly.  It happens so much I think most of us expect it, even several times a day.  We get to know who is walking which dogs when, or will be out working in the yard. One neighbor sits on a bench in the front yard every day smoking a cigar and reading the newspaper. I could do without the cigar part, and I am guessing so could his wife – which is why it’s a good thing he is out in the front yard. But the point is, there he is.  And I know it. All I need to do is take a moment and be a neighbor.

Even better, because we interact regularly in the neighborhood, “folks drop by.” Really, they do. No invitations. For no reason, our neighbors will come over and chat for a bit. We do the same.  But it doesn’t start that way.  I think we would all be a bit surprised if a neighbor we hadn’t interacted with much just dropped by to say hi.  It starts with “Hello” from time to time, then stopping to chat, then leads to neighbors who are part of your everyday life.

And that all begins with finding time. 

I really believe our overall mind set is “I don’t have time.” But you do.  You have exactly the same number of minutes in a day as anyone else. And while some things, like our jobs, take hours out of every day, it takes less than a second to say hello, less than a minute to ask how the other is doing, and five minutes to stop by.  We DO have time for that.

If we only take the moment it takes to think about it that way.

Time is the fuel of community.

As I was drinking my morning coffee this morning I looked out the window and across the street my neighbor was loading his pickup truck to go to work while another neighbor, who was in the process of walking her dog, stopped to chat and a third neighbor joined the conversation.

Three neighbors taking a moment.

Nobody put it on the calendar, it isn’t a scheduled event, but around here neighbors stop all the time to be… just neighborly.  It happens so much I think most of us expect it, even several times a day.  We get to know who is walking which dogs when, or will be out working in the yard. One neighbor sits on a bench in the front yard every day smoking a cigar and reading the newspaper. I could do without the cigar part, and I am guessing so could his wife – which is why it’s a good thing he is out in the front yard. But the point is, there he is.  And I know it. All I need to do is take a moment and be a neighbor.

Even better, because we interact regularly in the neighborhood, “folks drop by.” Really, they do. No invitations. For no reason, our neighbors will come over and chat for a bit. We do the same.  But it doesn’t start that way.  I think we would all be a bit surprised if a neighbor we hadn’t interacted with much just dropped by to say hi.  It starts with “Hello” from time to time, then stopping to chat, then leads to neighbors who are part of your everyday life.

And that all begins with finding time. 

I really believe our overall mind set is “I don’t have time.” But you do.  You have exactly the same number of minutes in a day as anyone else. And while some things, like our jobs, take hours out of every day, it takes less than a second to say hello, less than a minute to ask how the other is doing, and five minutes to stop by.  We DO have time for that.

If we only take the moment it takes to think about it that way.