How to Spend It
Maybe you’ve experienced this, working from home during the pandemic: for years after leaving a corporate working environment, starting my business, and working from home, I felt like I wasn’t really working. On a bad day, I felt like I was slacking off, even if I got a lot of work done. On a good day, I felt like I was getting away with something.
Feeling like I was “pretend-working” would regularly force me into making my calendar look similar to how it did when I was in corporate: filled in, with very little white space for self-care, breaks, reflection, or pauses. But, unfortunately, my body wasn’t having it: it would rebel in the form of procrastination or shut down, getting sick.
Since then, I consult with my body on a regular basis, up front. What does it need? Is this the right time? Right people? Right place? Right focus?
In the weeks after turning fifty, I’ve asked myself many questions. It started with, “how do I want to celebrate my birthday? How do I want to share time with others?” Those questions made me wonder what makes me happy and what makes things fun without feeling like a drag.
It eventually led me to reflect on how I want to spend my time.
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In the past, How to Spend It used to be something I looked forward to reading in the FT Weekend. Today, it’s taken a completely new meaning.
Spending time is an expression that translates into “how do I use time? What’s worth my time?” I started looking at the phrase more literally. If I have 25 years left in my time account, how do I want to spend it?
With money, I’ve been operating less from budgets and more from a spending plan. This way of relating to money and managing it works well for me: left to my own devices, I won’t spend much on myself.
A spending plan clarifies what and how to spend money in meaningful ways, and what’s a complete waste. I’ve been surprised at how old habits remain, even after why I put them in place no longer resonates with me.
Visibility on how and what I want to spend on gives me how much earning I need. It works from a place of abundance rather than scarcity and keeps me from feeling like there’s never enough. When I’m in a spending mindset rather than a budgeting one, I can generate and spend time and money more mindfully.
Back to spending time. I’m more intentional now on how I spend it. When I started asking myself why I wanted to spend time on something, I was surprised. Most of the time, my answers had to do with what I’ve learned at work, and not what works for me: “That’s what I’ve always done; that’s what’s been taught to me as best practice; it’s efficient.” They are definitions from an earlier time in life: It’s what they said work is supposed to look like.
Wait. Who are they?
They are previous employers and managers. Most answers were driven by how I’ve been formatted and trained in previous workplaces, primarily medium and large organizations, and by the managers whose performance was dependent, in part, on my performance.
My options were driven by capitalism.
Since capitalism is a shared language governing most spaces in the world, it would be unreasonable to shut it out of my life completely. Instead of trying to erase it from my life, I want to choose how I engage with it instead of being held a powerless captive.
I want to choose:
How I spend my time, energy, and money.
How do I make more time, energy, or money.
What do I want to spend on, specifically?
I want to have the following:
More awareness of how I waste or self-debt in time, energy, or money.
More ease around my decisions and my decision-making process.
I’m putting a spending plan together for time and money this month. I’ll let you know how it goes.
