What Is The Best Use Of Your Time

By: Zy Marquiez
November 17, 2015

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
—Martha Graham

Recently, someone who has been in my life by way of friendship shared a post on social media. A simple post, really. Or was it?

Let us backtrack one second.

Just earlier today, my mind was traveling through the endless escape that was insomnia, and lo and behold, idea after idea kept sprouting like a field of seeds which was bathed in eternal rain and sunshine.

Gears were turning, levers were pulled, ideas created, filtered, musings edited, so on and so forth. My purpose at this point seemed like an afterthought.  Since sleeplessness had reared its ugly head, this itself gave me a great opportunity; it occurred to me, why not use it?

Thus, after a while of catching up with news online, my said friend had shared a picture that stated one of the very questions that myself just happened to be ruminating on. Quite a coincidence.

It’s a rather simple, yet direct question: What is the best use of your time?

Really, what is it? Is it currently doing what you are doing? Personally, even being cognizant of how important efficient time-management is to me, it can still be daunting to try and be 100% efficient, 100% of the time. Seems rather mechanical doesn’t it? In my personal case, it’s just important that time is not misused, and would rather learn something interesting, learn something important. Better yet, time used in fashion to help myself, and/or help others. Now that is a large driver in my life.

Let us tackle the issue of time use with a simple notion.

Many folks have a penchant for watching TV. A lot of TV. For the myriad reasons that it takes place, the bottom line is that the average person watches 5 hours of TV per day. That amounts to 1,825 hours per year. That is 18250 hours per decade, and 91,250 hours per 50 years. That’s a lot of time! Over the course of 50 years, the totality of the time spent watching TV daily amounts to 3802 consecutive 24-hour days, over that span.  Or “just” 5 hours a day, for 50 years.

Not sure about how others see it, but for me at least, that’s an overwhelming amount of time that could be rather well spent elsewhere.

This is just a nuts and bolts cursory overview of time management in relation to efficiency. Furthermore, that does not take into account the amount of time people spend watching videos/tv online.

For the sake of simplicity, let us assume most of us happen to get 8 hours a day sleeping [yeah, its probably not that much, but let’s stick with it for a moment]. If one were to subtract an 8-hour sleep cycle from the total of 24 hours in a day, then you have 16 available hours to do as you please. Without even getting into whether one works or not, 5 out of those 16 available hours, or nigh 1/3 of all of the average person’s free time is being used by the average person to watch TV.

Fast forward far into the future. Let us crank the levers of imagination here for a second.

At the back end of one’s entire life, one can imagine that sooner or later in a moment of introspection a person might ponder about all those great times. You know, back in the day – a phrase that even many younglings use now days as if they’ve been around for many decades, and such. If one can imagine one of the people that spent an enormous amount of time watching TV, would that person be happy with themselves if they spent nigh 1/3 of all of the free time they had while they were alive watching television?

Let us be more precise. Where does adding 40 hours of work a week put us?

In an entire 168 hour work-week where the average person spends, 56 hours a week sleeping, and 40 hours a week working, that leaves one with 72 hours free. If one were to spend 35 hours a week viewing television, then that would leave 37 hours of free time. That’s nearly half of all of one’s available time spent watching television. That seems ludicrous, does it not?

Many people will propound the idea that they are tired, want to decompress, have had a ‘long day’, so on and so forth. One hears it quite often. That is completely understandable, to a point. But, don’t you think a person rather spend that free time with their loved ones? By the way, if watching TV with your loved ones is the APEX of quality time, then…you might want to rethink the meaning of the word quantity quality.

Why pose such a question? Because, in a world where poverty, all disease, war, et al. are not only endemic, but increasing, does it not stand to reason that a person should do all they can to protect themselves mentally/physically/psychologically/spiritually? Seems reasonable. But are people really putting that much – if any – time to not become a statistic? That however does not seem like a reasonable assumption, seeing as the numbers of folks facing a myriad of issues are increasing year in and year out unceasing.

If people were really doing everything they could to break free of the matrix of control that harvests them, would poverty, disease, war, etc. be increasing? Definitely not.

Some will instantly throw their hands in the air and say, but the republicans/democrats this, or the corporations that, or secret societies “control everything!” While there is endemic corruption in the modern landscape, do those groups/institutions really ‘control everything’?

Do they really? We just made a reasonable case that nearly half of all the free time the average person has in their entire lifetime is carried out choosing to watch TV. Don’t the very groups that people are quick to blame benefit from the inaction of watching TV, that when added up of a combined populace, numbers in the millions of hours of…watching TV? How many hours of extra labor [if one wanted too], or extra self-education, or extra exercise could be carried out by the individual if he/she were to apply a microscopic amount of all that extra TV time, into striving to be the very best of themselves? Think folks would get the picture?

The interesting aspect is that this whole mental exercise also does not take into account how much money goes directly into funding things that people claim they oppose, but which they financially support day in and day out. How many tens of millions of dollars are being spent inefficiently, rather than perhaps investing in the best thing one could, themselves? That number has to be beyond astronomical.

How could an individual ever breakaway their consciousness from this system/matrix, if so much time is spent doing such things?

Now that the levers of imagination have been shifted accordingly, what do you think people will decide? Keep in mind, one need not use all of the time that was use watching TV, doing something else. Just one hour daily, used in an ultra-efficient manner that directly benefits your mind/body/soul would be worth pursuing.

What kind of benefits would accrue if those hours add into the dozens or even hundreds per year? What about thousands of hours over a lifetime? That would create quite a powerful and capable individual – a boundless universe of conscious creation.

How much could one change in their life? What about their community? What about the world? How much could one create spending just a minute amount of time pushing yourself farther than you ever thought possible?

Why don’t we find out? The door is wide open. It’s only a choice.

A blank canvas awaits – a large marble uncut stone slab – for wondrous creation. Await those who want more. It awaits those who are not satisfied with their current path.