I have long understood that all people are divided into busy and idlers. For me, as a coach, these are not name-calling, but as important a characteristic as distinguishing between male and female audiences. What is interesting and understandable to the male audience is often incomprehensible and unnecessary to the female audience, and vice versa. The same goes for the busy and the idle.
Is the topic of time management relevant to busy people? Yes, it’s extremely relevant. I honestly admit that the only problem in my life is that I categorically lack one life, for happiness I definitely need two lives in parallel and three in series. Accordingly, the task of each day is how to cram the unpushable, how to pack all the many things that you so much need and so want to do in one day? What will you still have to give up today in order to make the most-most priority? What will have to be killed to give life to the most important project of the day, month and year?
But there are other people who have other concerns: how to fill their day. To these numerous people, the respected Eric Berne devoted an entire book, «People Who Play Games», describing the numerous ways of STRUCTURING TIME. I like this politically correct wording. Not “What to do when there is nothing to do”, but “How to structure your time”? What kind of games, rituals and even sometimes procedures will we occupy the empty time of our lives — we idlers?
This is not a banality. This is more than obvious to the vast majority of Russian citizens who dream of how to find such a job so as not to work — or to find an opportunity to simply not work and just relax. What for? To not work and enjoy life, that is, idleness. They are helped by books with bright titles: “How to live in order to work 2 hours a week” and trainings of a similar nature.
You don’t like to work? You just don’t know how to do it!
I consult a lot and I see: busy, business people have much less mental problems than idlers. Busy, business people come to me with a clear plan: such a problematic situation, I want it, I tried such options, it turned out like this, I want to discuss additional opportunities. Everything is clear, thought out, reasonable. But idlers swim and drown in problems. They do not know what they want, they know how to get upset, but they are not used to thinking, and doing something with themselves is as difficult and undesirable for them as they do not want to work in principle.
And most importantly, they do not want to get rid of their problems. Because if they get rid of their problems, what will they do then? Now they are busy getting rid of their problems, so they are not even loafers, but suffering people, one might say busy. And if you get rid of problems, if you stop being offended at each other in a couple, if you stop hurting each other through a word, then what should they do next to each other and, in principle, what to do with themselves?
Today I talked with a smart woman who cannot imagine how not to worry about the fact that her father has very high blood pressure and he lives only on pills, on the verge of death. But she is smart, when asked “Who promised you that your loved ones will always be healthy and not die?” she immediately remembered the Declaration of Acceptance of Reality, thought, said: “Really!”, and then asked even more thoughtfully: “But if I stop worrying about my father, then what should I do in life? I don’t have children. For what to live? Good question!
I am sure that the main problem of co-dependents and everyone who has sunk into sick attachments is that they have nothing to live for. Having entangled themselves with addictions and immobilized themselves with attachment, they avoid this issue. Now they can live for nothing, they can take care of alcoholic husbands, support children who are gamers and drug addicts, live in suffering through unhappy love, and so on, find ways to structure the time of their lives. That is, if you remove political correctness — kill the time of your life. Kill your life.
I wish you to live with the most stressful time management. Only when your life is filled with business in the densest way, you will not be up to stupid things, not up to psychological games, you will not have time for suffering. And a business that requires smart efficiency will teach you to always live with your head and without worries, look for solutions, live in energy, constructiveness and responsibility. Get busy and take on time management: this is really the foundation of your mental health.
Cheers!