My Simple Community

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.