Goal, or not to goal!

Life seems to have gotten busier, everyone is too busy to do anything.

We have such an influx of information that it has driven people to do nothing with it. We keep creating more technology to do tasks for us, we keep setting up automation systems and management systems, increasing efficiency and productivity and this has resulted in people having less time and accomplishing less. There are definitely people who are benefiting from this but it does not seem to be the majority of us.

When a job used to be 9 to 5, now we have more efficient phones, so we are available 24 hours a day, we have a more efficient communication method through email, now we are available 24 hours a day on email. Remote desktops were created and now we can be in front of our desk 24 hours a day. No matter where we go or what we are doing, we can now work. This sounds great, everyone must have huge salary increases due to their constant availability and increased productivity!

Sadly the opposite is the reality, salaries are not for the most part keeping up with inflation. People are living with their parents for longer, starting families later, and living with financial insecurity for most if not all of their lives. This is the realistic outcome of our advancement with technology. Instead of being able to spend more time living we are finding ways to spend more time working and earning less for that privilege.

A relevant statement from Jim Rohn (American entrepreneur, author and motivational speaker) is how much does a T.V cost? It is not what is on the price tag but thousands of dollars per year.

So will all these advances in technology that are aimed at giving us a better quality of life and more time to live, where has it gone wrong that has caused the opposite effect?

It is not difficult to see, lets look at a few things:

Television: Back in the day we used to have a few channels and we could watch what was on or not, that was the choice. Today we generally have 100’s of channels in addition we have on demand streaming with Netflix, YouTube, ShowMax and many other similar services, this means we can now spend a huge amount of time in front of a screen without getting bored of repeats. Now for example look at Game of Thrones, that series from start to finish is about 70 hours, so if you have watched the entire series you have essentially spent almost the equivalent of 9 working days, and that is just on Game of Thrones! Work out how much you earn per hour and you can see how much you could have been paid for that time.

There can be lots of arguments about needing entertainment, it being done in the evenings over a long period etc. but this review isn’t looking into those areas, I am simply highlighting where our precious time is being stolen. This time could have been pursuing a passion, learning a new skill, doing relationship building activities with people you love etc.

Next, communication: Back in the day it cost per minute, or three minutes to talk to someone on the phone, so you would usually be conscious of how long you were on a call, that is gone with voice over internet services such as WhatsApp, now spending an hour per call is no problem so some people spend a lot more time talking to people, and it is the same with messaging. We used to send an email and get a reply days later, it cost everyone involved every time they connected to the internet and for the duration they were on the internet, people weren’t continuously connected and didn’t have email and messaging on their mobile phones, the messaging that was on phones was basic and limited to a certain amount of characters with a cost per message, so people also used these a lot more sparingly. Now sending hundreds and thousands of messages and emails per day does nothing to increase costs so a lot more time is spent sending and receiving information on these platforms. This is something that never used to take much time out of our lives and not dominates us daily.

I have with a lot of difficulty managed to reduce my screen time on my phone to under 2 hours per day, but you can easily spend more hours looking at your screen, especially if you play games or have a more active social life. So now a phone that used to be used for calls and used to take almost no time out of our lives is now combined with unlimited messaging, unlimited calling, unlimited emails, games, movies, music and is the only device we actually need to be able to waste 24 hours in a day.

Next up we have social media and internet browsing: With the growth of the internet there are unlimited sites and services just itching to suck up your time, from Facebook and Twitter to Google helping you find useful sites that flood our brains with so much information that we flip from tab to tab in a daze for hours and hours on end, and that’s after we’ve managed to fight off the T.V, get away from the phone, and now we’re sucked into an endless void. And it isn’t even necessarily done individually, you could be sitting in front of the T.V, browsing the internet on your phone while switching to and from your messaging app. There is no escaping! While a lot of the information is absolutely fantastic, you can learn anything you want, about anything you want, once you find the information you still have to escape the clutches of these vices in order to actually implement what you have learnt, which unfortunately again is where a lot of people fall short.

And a final consideration, shopping centers and malls: I don’t remember shopping being such a huge part of life, shopping was done as required and usually a couple of times a month, now it is not unusual to go shopping a few times during the week for necessities and then on weekends you go to a mall and spend hours and hours wondering around from shop to shop, either browsing or browsing and buying. Window shopping used to be something you did a couple of times a year, now its done almost on a weekly basis. This eats into the daylight hour we get to ourselves after spending the week at work, now we have time to actually do outdoor things and instead of finding activities to do, we troop off to the mall full of shops and fast food outlets, everything we need in one place, but an overall reduction in the quality of our lives.

So there we have what I think are some of our biggest thieves, highlighted. We invent time saving devices like washing machines, dishwashers, slow cookers, vacuum cleaners, and then take all that saved time, double it and hand it over to our television and phone, fooling ourselves into thinking this is what life is meant to be.

While nobody can give you more time, which is definitely the first thought that pops in as a solution, what you can do is better manage the time you have, place more importance on the time you spend doing things and get the most benefit from what you do.

Don’t cheat yourself, you are the only one going to lose! If watch a cooking show under the pretense that you are “learning to cook” or “learning good tips,” sit down right now and list the “good tips” or “recipes” that you have learnt and when you have used them. You may find that after a few seasons of Master Chef what you have walked away with is many hours of wasted time, no usable knowledge has been acquired. Or maybe you are now a gourmet chef in which case well done.

We all need entertainment, and we all like down time where what we are doing is essentially pointless but pleases us, the problem arises when that down time and pointlessness takes over our lives, it makes our lives meaningless, to us and to those in it. It doesn’t matter how you package it, watching a series, playing a never ending game, or visiting millions of pointless websites (pointless as in not beneficial, there are many many sites that contain valuable information), doing those things will not improve your life, will not make you happier and more fulfilled, and will not help you accomplish anything.

So the first thing to do is accept that things take time, reading this post for example takes time, reading a book takes time, learning a skill takes time, you need to accept that and not expect it to be instant, be willing to give the important things time, you can just take the time away from the unimportant things such as watching T.V, browsing social media, there are many unimportant and non-beneficial time wasters that you can reduce to give the time to the more beneficial areas of your life.

Once you have the time and have accepted that important things will take time, you are ready to start improving your life. Spending time on self improvement is the most important aspect of our lives, we can improve our skills, improve our relationships, improve our minds and improve our lives.

Once you have the time, you need to have direction. You can spend some time researching the best way to get direction in your life, one way that I think is brilliant is through goals, and I am not alone in this thought. You should come up with your goals and then continually refine and define them, giving you a map for you life, this in turn will give you a path to follow and a way to measure your progress.

You should create goals for every aspect of your life and then continually update and refine them, this way as you move forward in you life you can get a clearer, easier to follow path.

If you put down as a goal: Own my own jet, and simply leave it as that, don’t define it, and don’t think about it again, chances are you are probably not going to simply wake up one morning with a jet. By having decided that is something you want you have already made a huge step towards achieving it that you did before you decided you wanted it. But there are many things that contribute towards getting it and then owning it (I don’t know what they are as I haven’t considered them, so these are simply imaginations), I know you need the money to buy it, in addition you have to decide what plane you want to buy, how much money do you need, where are you going to keep it, who is going to fly it, are you going to learn to fly it, how long does that take, where can you do courses, how much will it cost, how much will it cost to maintain the plane, what insurance will you need, are you going to own it alone or do you want to part own it with someone else, can you use it commercially to cover some of the cost of maintaining it, would it be possible to earn back the cost of it, are you interested in it being commercial in any way or is it just a luxury for you, and there are many other things you can consider too. These go into the defining of your goal.

Create your goal, and then continually define and refine that goal, put everything in order, you need money, how much? you need tools, what tools? you need lessons, where, when, how much? You want a new car, what car, how much is it?

As you create your goals and define them you get to know what you need to do and you get an idea on how to do it and then you get to accomplish your goal, and that gives you the life you want.

Lets say you want to own your own house. You have decided that, now don’t do anything else carry on with your life just as you are, don’t save, don’t change your lifestyle, just carry on working and surviving and watching home remodel T.V show because we all know that at some point the directors of those shows randomly pick a loyal viewer to donate a house to.

Then use the goal method of creating the goal, define it, and work towards it. Set a budget, look at properties in that budget, save, find ways to earn some extra money through hobbies or extra work to add to your savings. Which method would get you the house? It simply makes sense that having goals and working towards them will give you results while having some vague idea of some vaguely perfect life will help keep you in the life you are in.

With no destination you have already arrived, you have completed your life and are now simply waiting for the next stage. If you do not feel like your life is over, its time to decide on a destination.