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The Sad Truth Of How We Waste Our Life

3 April, 2008 - Motivation - 2 Comments

Photo by Tookie

I’ve been on quite the Twitter binge this evening (this evening being 3:40am on Thursday). A few hours ago, at the start of the binge, I wrote this:

Just worked out I waste half a day yawning each year. Crazy! 30 yawns a day. One second per yawn in case you’re wondering how I worked it out.

(It turns out my math was slightly wrong, but that only made the results worse as you’ll find out below)

It got me wondering just how much time I waste each year doing things I would rather not be doing, so without further ado I’m going to set out to stun and surprise you all with my wasteful ways. (I better turn the Westlife song off first… read my Twitter account to figure out what that’s all about!)

Yawning

We all yawn. It’s our body’s way to intake more oxygen and expel more CO2 (or so the good Doc tells us). But open wide and chew on this…

30 Yawns Per Day (That’s quite a reasonable amount for the average 9-5 office-worker, I think)
Six Seconds Per Yawn (According to the average here)

30 yawns multiplied by six seconds… errm… 180 seconds (three minutes) of each day is spent yawning. That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Wrong.
Three Minutes multiplied by seven days = 21 Minutes Yawning Per Week. Still not too bad, eh?
21 Minutes Multiplied by four weeks = 1hr 24 Minutes Yawing Per Month. Getting worse now…
1hr 24 Minutes multiplied by 12 months = 16 Hours 48 Minutes Yawning Per Year. Wow! Over half a day of yawing each day. Twice as long as the average work day is spent yawning each year. Oh… there goes another yawn.

Dealing With Emails

Wait. Another yawn.

…
…
…

That’s better.

I’m going to take a not-so-educated guess and say the average office-worker spends two hours each day dealing with emails (replying and sending). I reckon that’s a conservative guess, but even if it’s not the results are quite astonishing. (If anybody has facts for how long people spend emailing, please send them my way).

Two Hours Per Day = 14 Hours Per Week
14 Hours Per Week = 56 Hours Per Month (Yes, more than two full days each month are spent dealing with email)
56 Hours Per Month = 672 Hours Per Year (Or to be more precise, 28 days). Yes, almost a full month of our lives each year are spent dealing with email.

Twitter!

On an average day, most people will spend an hour Twittering. Today, I’ve spent seven hours Twittering (most of which has been non-stop with new updates every couple of minutes… or seconds.).

One Hour Per Day = 7 Hours Per Week
7 Hours Per Week = 28 Hours Per Month
28 Hours Per Month = 336 Hours Per Year (Or 14 days per year). Yup, a full two weeks of our life each year goes towards Twittering. If I were to live to 70 and continued this trend, that would be over two full years of my life spent on Twitter! Wow! Two years!!

Communting to Work

I’m fortunate in that my commute to work involves the two minute walk from my bedroom to my downstairs office, but a lot of people spend at least two hours each day commuting to and from work. In the dealing with emails section we found out this equates to 28 days each year.

The Solution

The solution is, of course, less sleep. Going to sleep at 11pm and waking up at 9am was common place for me. At least that was the case up to last week. Then I read Steve Pavlina’s How To Become An Early Riser and I realised that if I conditioned my body to get seven hours sleep, rather than the usual ten, I could be sure to see the sun rise as well as set and add several years of “awake time” to my life.

Apart from tonight (where it is now 5am and still awake), I’ve been going to sleep at 10pm and then waking up at 5am. That’s seven hours sleep, rather than my usual ten. Three less hours sleep than usual, or in the glass-half-full attitude, three extra hours I’m awake.

That three hours each day adds up to 21 hours each week (shock! Almost an extra day in my week). Then 84 hours each month (Almost four extra days each month) ends up at 1,008 hours per year (or 42 extra days for me to get work done). Over a lifetime (assuming I reach 70) that eventually adds up to over five extra years of “awake-time”. Five extra years for a simple three hour reduction in sleep each night! I’ll be writing more about sleep in the near future.

The Summary

Our lives revolve around often meaningless tasks that were not present thirty years ago. Let’s bring all those sums above together:

If we yawn 30 times a day: 17 Hours
If we deal with our emails: 28 Days
If we write on Twitter: 14 Days
If we commute to work: 28 Days

If we do all four of those things, we lose over 70 days of our year to often unproductive tasks.

In A Lifetime

At 20 years old, if I were to do those four things until I was 70, I would lose a total of 3,500 days of my life to somewhat unproductive or inconvenient modern-day tasks. In case you’re wondering, that’s over nine years.

But remember that the solution of a body conditioned to less sleep reduces the impact these modern-day tasks have on your life.

Keep a close eye and close management on where you’re spending time. Obviously we can’t control when we yawn, but that example shows even the small, insignificant things amount to serious time over a year or a lifetime.

How well do you track your time? Do you often feel like you could be spending your time better elsewhere? Let us all know in the comments!

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Posted on 3 April, 2008 by Jamie Harrop
Filed Under Motivation |

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