In teacher preparation programs, one of the first things you learn is “C = I = A”. This simple equation means that your curriculum (what you’re supposed to teach) should be aligned with your instruction (what you actually teach) and that should be aligned with your assessment (what you test the kids on). Seems pretty straightforward. What you should do, what you did do, and what you see you did should be the same.
I find that this type of alignment generalizes well to how we should view our time. Instead of curriculum, instruction, and assessment, however, the pieces are intention, action, and evaluation. In more detail,
- Intention is how you WANT to spend your time, based on what you value.
- Action is how you ACTUALLY spend your time.
- Evaluation is how you think you spend your time, and how you feel about that.
When these three things are aligned, it’s pretty obvious that you can be happier. If you say you want to prioritize time with your family, then you actually do spend more time with them, and you recognize and enjoy the time spent, that’s a recipe for happiness.
I plan on writing longer posts about each of the three (I’ll link them here when I do), but here’s a little bit of depth for each.
Intention
We all know how we say we want to spend our time. We want to rest, we want to pick that hobby back up, we want to see our kids or parents or partner more, we want to watch that new show, we want to work out, we want to meditate, we want to read… the list is endless. We set our New Year’s resolutions, we set birthday resolutions, we set “It’s a Sunday Night and My Life Feels Like It’s Falling Apart and I Need to Change NOW” resolutions, which all, in some way or another, demand a change in how we spend our time.
Our intentions are deeply connected to what we value. Money, health, connection, comfort, ease, and countless other things drive what we intend to do.
The tricky thing is, even if we don’t set intentions consciously, they are there, working unseen and unexamined to shape our behavior.
The key to bringing the intention piece of the equation into alignment, is to reflect on and consciously set your intentions for your time. Knowing what you truly value can guide you in this process. Here are some questions to help dig into your values to craft your intentions:
- What can I not live without?
- If I was on my deathbed, what things would I be most happy about having spent my time on? What would I regret wasting time on?
- If all obligations were cared for, what would I do today?
- When my kids look at what I do day to day, what do I want them to see?
Action
Action seems the most straightforward. What do you actually spend your time on?
However, if you’re anything like me, you probably couldn’t give a minute-by-minute (or maybe even an hour-by-hour) breakdown of what you did the last few days. The broad strokes, I’ve got that, but the minutiae? Ehhh…not so much. What did I really do while I waited for dinner to cook? What did I do while I waited for that zoom call to start? Our big chunks of time, when we work, when we sleep, etc., are fairly fixed, but we have little sprinklings of time confetti throughout the day that go unexamined.
When this time confetti falls into our day, we often fill it with mindless districation. Take a quick look at your phone’s screen time graph and you’ll probably see the results of that.
Even bigger chunks of our day we spend on autopilot, without consciously choosing where our attention, and thus our time, will go.
One of the most foundational pieces of the What You Make Time For philosophy is that these choices present the greatest opportunity for feeling better about how we spend our time.
The first step to bringing our actions into alignment is to be honest and conscious about how you’re actually spending your time. I recommend keeping a time log for as long as you reasonably feel like it. A day works, a week is better, but any amount will help. You can do this on a simple sticky note, your notes app, or one of the countless time-logging apps out there. Keep it simple, and just note what you do and how long you spend doing it. You don’t have to be super detailed, but you do want to include enough gradation in the activities logged so that a clear picture appears.
The second step is to align your actions with your intentions. Before we do that though, I want to expand on evaluation.
Evaluation
Even before we think deeply about it, through analyzing our intentions and actions, we already have some idea about how we THINK we spend our time. We think we’re busy, overbooked, always working, always doing chores, never home. From those thoughts arise myriad feelings: we feel guilt, stress, burnout, anger, resentment, nostalgia, grief, regret.
Eventually, these feelings bubble over and we can find ourselves setting new intentions to finally get our shit together and make ourselves happy.
However, without conscious consideration of your thoughts and feelings about your time, you are going to stay stuck in the same cycles of unconscious intention, mindless action, and negative evaluation.
When you can consider your thoughts and feelings about your time in a compassionate, nonjudgemental way, you can actually find clarity on what you value. If you’re guilty that you’re never home, obviously you value being home with your family. If you’re angry about the never-ending chores, maybe you value a clean and clutter-free house and a division of labor that enables that.
To meaningfully evaluate how you feel about how you spend your time, you should ask yourself: where does it feel like your time is going and how does that make you feel? Crucially, you must accept the answer that arises with compassion. Self-compassion is paramount in this whole process. Your feelings and perceptions are valid, even if they may not be helpful right now. The goal is to become aware of these thoughts and feelings so you can decide if they are useful for you.
Once you are aware of how you feel, you can reflect back on your actions: does how you FEEL you spend your time match up with how you ACTUALLY do? Our brains have a lot of biases, particularly negativity biases, that can cloud our perceptions. Be real with yourself and be compassionate with what you find. This little reality check can often give us space from the feelings and judgments that arise around where our time goes.
Bringing it into Alignment
To bring these three, intention, action, and evaluation, into alignment, I recommend starting with evaluation. Investigate how you think and feel about your time and be accepting of those answers.
From there, you can sift through what it is you value and how you would like to choose to spend your time. When you settle on your intentions, I recommend writing them down somewhere you can reference easily.
Once you know how you want to spend your time, you are better equipped to make choices that align with your intentions. This requires mindfulness throughout your day, lest you slip into habitual distraction.
Finally, you can evaluate how you feel now about your time and reflect on whether your intentions and actions are aligning.
It is important to note that this process is cyclical, not one-and-done. It demands repeated inquiry into our choices and feelings.
Now obviously this is simple, and life is messy. Changing habits and patterns, sitting with our emotions, uncovering our values, all these things are challenging. I plan to write more about this in the future, but as with anything, I had to start somewhere. I hope you find this framework useful. If you give it a try, let me know how it goes! I’ll be sharing my own reflections on this process in the near future.