Managing Your 3 Resource Systems – TIME

NOTE: The prologue of this post (in orange text) is the same in all three posts under the general title “Managing Your 3 Resource Systems.” Topic-specific content is below that.

A lot of people are looking for the magic key that will open a door to the meaning and joy of life. Unhappy people are convinced they will find this key one day, which is why happiness eludes them. It’s not actually something you can find, and there is no magic key or secret door. Looking for happiness assumes that you do not presently know where it is, when in fact it’s not anywhere at all.

Happiness arises as you learn how to master the three resource systems of your life: Time, Money, and Health. Again, you won’t find happiness some day in the future, and neither can it be purchased or achieved. When we talk about mastering these three resource systems, don’t make the mistake of thinking that this, finally! is your magic key.

Happiness is a measure of the flow, quality, and connection of your life to what really matters. It’s not that getting rich will make you happy, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the flow of wealth in their lives. It’s not that being in perfect health will make you happy, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the quality of health known as vigor, which enables them to enjoy more of what life has to offer.

And it’s not that you need more time to get happy – and believing so is a sure-fire setup for disappointment, but it is true that happy people are better at mastering the connections over time to what supports the life they really want.

After we take a look at the separate elements in the mastery of each of the three resource systems of Time, Money, and Health we will step up a level to talk about the meta-skill of managing your life across all three. Mentallurgy LifeChange teaches that Time, Money, and Health are really just different transformations of the energy known as consciousness. By managing your balance across the three systems, you will be cultivating the conditions that allow happiness to arise.

Time

Let’s begin by making some critical distinctions inside the resource system called Time. Whenever we speak of “time management” we are not really presuming to manage time itself, but rather the amount and quality of time we give to things. We can’t define time in the abstract since it’s always contained inside event-cycles, referring to how long something takes from start to finish, from beginning to end. The largest event-cycle we know of is called the Universe, and the smallest is the half-life of subatomic particles. Somewhere in between is your lifetime, and inside that are many countless smaller event-cycles such as friendships, careers, household projects, the laundry, a video game, and the time it takes for you to read this blog post.

So when you “manage time” you are really managing the many event-cycles that connect your life to the reality around you, and to possible futures ahead of you.

We can further distinguish among these connections by seeing how some things come upon you suddenly and demand your attention. Their urgency grabs your focus and won’t let go until you’re worn out, make a decision to disengage, or get past the last-minute deadline with success or failure. Your house on fire is urgent, but so is the due date of that assignment you procrastinated on or the text message of a friend who needs a response now. Just because it’s urgent doesn’t make it bad or unworthy of your attention.

In contrast to these urgent demands on your time are such eternal values as peace, love, beauty, and truth. Eternal here is not a reference to the otherworldly and everlasting objects of religious interest. At its root it simply means timeless, abiding, and essential. The eternal value of beauty, for example, is timeless as an ideal and recognized only in its embodiment or temporal expressions. By giving time to the cultivation of harmony, proportion, grace, and elegance in your life, you are connecting to the eternal value of beauty.

What needs your attention isn’t all right now in this moment, in these urgent demands or eternal ideals. Your life is an unfolding event-cycle opening into any number of possible futures. How things end up going depends a lot on your aims, decisions, choices, and actions. As a resource system, then, Time requires that you look ahead to your preferred future, to the scenario you really want.

Some of it will break down to short-term goals – things to accomplish in a few hours, a few days, or a few months from now. But other aspects of your preferred future are more long-term – a few years or even decades from now. It’s important to keep the frame large enough and the view long enough so that the things which develop slowly, or only come about through consistent effort and patient attention, are not neglected.

Think of each of these elements in the resource system of time as an “action.” With each action you are connecting your life to a type of value – immediate and pressing (urgent), timeless and inspirational (eternal), those on the near horizon (short-term), as well as values that clarify the general direction you want your life to go (long-term).

Managing your life well in time requires an ability to distinguish between urgent and eternal, so that what is time-critical doesn’t absorb all your time and keep you from cultivating the timeless values that make life truly meaningful. You shouldn’t try to eliminate urgency entirely, as some of it contributes to the spontaneity, unpredictability, and surprise of life.

As unhappy people will teach us, however, urgent values are more likely to crowd out eternal values than the other way around.

The reason for this has a lot to do with the way unhappy people create their own urgency. By failing to lengthen their view of life so as to chart a course into a preferred future, unhappy people are constantly surprised: by sudden deadlines, last-minute demands, an avalanche of unforeseen consequences, the whirlwind of details impossible to sort out and nail down.

This is not the sort of surprise that adds positive excitement to life! The chronic urgency of putting out fires or frantically looking for their keys takes up precious time which could be given to creating the life they really want. In managing life in the resource system of time, not giving attention to the values and connections that truly matter will only generate stress, which eventually translates into distress, exhaustion, and depression.

Stress is one of the drains down which unhappy people lose the quality and joy of life.