Reinvest Your Time During COVID-19.

This article for goldfish:

• How you spend your time on a daily basis has a massive impact on how your life will look like five years down the line.
• If your profession is not considered “essential” during COVID-19, this is your opportunity to make changes and reinvent yourself.
• Invest your hours wisely and get something positive out of an otherwise negative situation.

This article for humans:

Time.

Once it’s used, it’s gone. Nothing but a memory.

In a literal sense, it can’t be traded, it can’t be borrowed, it can’t be bought. Everybody has the same 24 hours a day. Even when given equal opportunity, some people are able to move mountains within a relatively short period of time, while others use most of their waking hours descending down a path of self destruction.

You’re probably somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

Before COVID-19, most of us were lucky enough to spend those 24 hours in relative freedom. A lock-down changes this outlook drastically, but if you’re privileged enough to have a reliable internet connection, you still have plenty of options left on the table.

Even taking the current situation into account, how you spend your time on a daily basis has a massive impact on how your life will look like five years down the line.

If your profession is not considered “essential” during COVID-19, this is your opportunity to make changes and reinvent yourself. Map out how you spend your 24 hours. Invest your hours wisely and get something positive out of an otherwise negative situation.

To illustrate what this could look like, I will give you an estimation of how I spent my 24 hours on a regular workday before COVID-19 (few limitations) and after COVID-19 (limited by lock-down).

COVID-19 had a drastic impact on how I am able to spend my 24 hours and I can only begin to imagine how this works out when you are having young kids at home.

On the downside, working in the travel industry resulted in my workweek being reduced from 40 hours to 16 hours.

On the upside, no time is wasted on commuting now every day is a ‘work from home’ day. In addition, all of a sudden I found myself with plenty of hours to reinvest in projects that I’ve been holding back on in the past, simply because I didn’t have make the time for them.

Now movement is restricted by a lock-down, I find myself with lots of time to write, read and learn.

Mapping out your average weekday, you’ll likely find ample opportunity to invest more time in long-term goals. Whether that’s more important than ‘downtime’, is different for everyone and might depend on how anxious you feel towards the whole situation.

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You’re also likely to find plenty of opportunity to take the time spent on activities that demand little attention (having breakfast, commuting), making it more productive by listening to an audio book or podcast in the background.

I could easily have spent the newly available hours on social media and Netflix, but I don’t expect it to benefit me when I look back on this day five years from now*.

*Although I have to admit that I spent a good amount of time watching a gay redneck breeding tigers in his backyard. You can find those hours back in the ‘Downtime’ section of the pie charts displayed above.

COVID-19 or no COVID-19, Tiger King or no Tiger King, think for yourself how you can spend more hours that will benefit you on the long run.

How many of your 24 hours are you investing in learning, growing, getting a step closer to making your dreams a reality?

Whether your goals are related to your career, fitness, travel, helping others or building meaningful relationships, if you really want to, you can almost always dedicate more time to get yourself a step closer to those goals. 

Can you shift priorities during COVID-19 in order to make time work for you?

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