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March
Creating Time
Ask most men what they would like more of and if
the answer isn’t sex or money - it will be
time. None of us seems to have enough. And it also
seems that no-one is responsible for this. It is
just how the world is. It is just how things are.
It is just how things must be.
“Sorry darling, I’ve got to be here
for a meeting”, “I must dash, Mum,
doctor’s appointment”, “Sorry kids
no time to play, got to check my e-mail”.
Where will it end? As it is we deprive ourselves of
all sorts of vital daily things because of our need
to hurry. Love, food, sleep, conversation - all
things that we curtail or postpone or cancel
because of our need to meet deadlines. And yet who
are we meeting these deadlines for? The answers
come back thick and fast. My boss, my colleagues,
my partner. When are we going to start meeting
deadlines that we set?
Are we really listening to our own needs often
enough? Do we really need to live life at this
breakneck speed all the time, or is it purely
habit? How many of us for instance find that we
work and work and work leading up to our holiday,
only to find that when we finally switch off and
slow down we have developed flu, if not something
worse? How many of us find that when we ask the
children to do something for us, we expect them to
do it for us right this minute, even though they
may be involved in some other game or activity?
So manic have we become that our whole life
tends to revolve around schedules. Schedules that
very often we are merely playing a part in rather
than taking hold of and saying “Hey, hang on a
second, this is my life, I want to have a say in
what happens and when”. We may have come so
far down this path, that most of us no longer
realise that we have any say in how our time is
filled.
I would suggest that nothing could be further
from the truth.
Our time is our own. Our life is our own. Only
we ourselves can make our decisions. Believe it or
not, we have chosen our schedules as they exist at
the moment and only we can choose to change
them.
If you are the sort of man who is frequently
hurrying and never seems to have enough time for
anything, then now is the time to consider change.
Change your approach to yourself, start taking your
own needs and desires more seriously and you may
find that you begin to abandon activities which no
longer fit in with who you now wish to be. You may
well find yourself with more time on your hands.
The more time you spend listening to your own
requirements, the more time you will have to fulfil
them. Carry on hurrying from place to place, from
meeting to meeting, from TV programme to TV
programme and you will find you will never have
enough time to do all the things that you really
want.
There is a saying in the financial world that
you have to ‘speculate to accumulate’.
The same is true of time. If you spend more time
listening to your own needs, you are likely to
accumulate more time to do these things. There is
no reason to be proud of the fact that we are
always busy. We could all fill our time
permanently. Part of the reward that we may receive
from this hectic activity is that it makes us feel
important, it makes us feel wanted. Having to be
somewhere all the time not only gives us a feeling
of importance and value in society, but it also
gives us ‘valid’ reasons as to why we
cannot attend to this family matter or that
relationship problem. Time spent at work becomes in
particular a fact of life which apparently
can’t be controlled. We have become pawns in a
game that, judging by the state of some men today,
we are not sure we even enjoy playing that
much.
The key question is not how much of my time do I
fill every day, but how much of my time do I fill
doing what I love?
Here we are often complaining of not having
enough time, only to find that we spend much of our
time doing things that we don’t really enjoy.
People talk about quality time as if time itself
were the problem. It is not. And it never can be.
The conditioning that tells us to fill every
available minute is the problem and that can only
change if we choose to change it. No amount of
complaining about the lack of time will make one
bit of difference. We have to change our
understanding of our relationship to time if we are
to start making the best use of the time that we
have.
Changing our view of time can have extraordinary
effects upon our lives. If we can start to change
from feeling we have to get things done as quickly
as possible to wanting to do something that is as
good as we could do, we will find that our end
result is that much better and consequently our
self-esteem that much higher. For instance,
explaining to a client that we think their deadline
is going to jeopardise the end result can only make
us feel better about ourselves, even if we end up
losing that job. This generally doesn’t
happen. Worthwhile businesses would far rather
employ conscientious people with high
standards.
It is the feeling that we have somehow achieved
something good that is so important in our
development as men. Getting things done quickly is
unlikely to engender the same positive feeling. It
is perhaps through this greater understanding of
our relationship to time that we could begin to
contribute so much more to improving the
environment that we live in.
©2010, Barry Durdant-Hollamby
See Books,
Issues
Barry
Durdant-Hollamby is the founder of The
Art of
Change
 ,
a UK based organisation specialising in helping
individuals and corporations to effect sustainable,
holistic, positive change. He works intuitively on
a 1-1 or group basis and also conducts many talks
and seminars - all without notes or preparation!
Barry is also the author of three books the latest
of which is The
Male Agenda - a book
which seeks to inspire men to create greater life
balance and happiness. He is the father of two
daughters and lives in the South East of England.
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