It seems to be happening more and more often that I plan out my day and the math just doesn't work. I leave myself six or seven hours to sleep at night and I am still coming up with 30-hour days. I don't have a job to rush to five days a week, so where has all of my time gone?
Don't get me wrong; I put in my 40+ each week making the green that helps to keep our world go round. But I make my own schedule and I still cannot make time every day for the things I want and need to do. I would imagine that a lot of people have this problem, but have you ever stopped to wonder where the time does go when it seems like there aren't enough hours in a day?
Ok, let's figure in the standard eight hours a day, five days a week for work. But if we are being honest, most people have to work around 50 hours or so just to make 40 hours worth of wages. There are 168 hours in a week, so subtracting work leaves us 118 hours.
If we allow for the minimal amount of sleep, let's say six hours a night, then that is another 42 hours each week knocked off our total. Now we are at 76 hours a week and we have not even started to talk about the immense amount of time Americans spend watching television.
I do not watch much television, but if we figure in video game time every day with the grandson and television time together, you get maybe four hours a day. That makes another 28 hours a week gone and brings our total down to 48 hours left for the week.
Everyone has to eat, but not everyone takes the time to eat right. Let's average it out to include weekly family dinners, Thanksgiving. and extended lunches to go along with the two-minute breakfast to say that we spend an average of two hours a day eating and helping to take care of the dishes. If we include the time spent sneaking around to eat snacks, I think that is a fair number. Now we subtract 14 more hours from our total and we get 34 hours a week left over.
Do you golf? Maybe you like to work on cars? Perhaps you set aside time each day to play with the kids. What if we said that we spend an average of two hours a day on the hobbies and activities we enjoy. That would knock another 14 hours from the week and leave us with 20 total hours.
That means that we have less than three hours a day left over to do whatever else it is we need to do. A part-time job can eat up that time and more, and you could probably also write that time off to having to deal with problems and issues as they come up. I like to read as much as I can, so that may be another hour a day gone. When you add it all up, it becomes easier to see why it seems like there is never time to do the things you really want to do.
So what's the point? The point is that you should make time for the important things and bypass some of the nonsense because you never know when your time will be gone. Yeah, we could lean on the unlikely possibility that you could walk out of your house tomorrow and get hit by a bus. But I would rather deal with the more likely scenario that you get diagnosed with a potentially deadly illness, or you experience a medical problem that limits your ability to move. At that point, you have all of the time in the world, but there is nothing you can do with it.
Time is precious. We should never waste it. Yes, we need to take care of the things that are important like our jobs and our doctor's appointments. But there is always time to do the other important things as well. Spend time with your loved ones, make music if you want, and just be sure that when your time is up - you don't feel cheated. Make the most of it folks because, before you know it, your time is gone and you would have no one to blame for feeling like you wasted your time except yourself.
George N Root III is a Lockport resident who wastes a lot of time writing. Follow him on Twitter @georgenroot3, or send him a message at georgenroot3@gmail.com.
