Having Enough Time

How many times have you heard people say 'I haven't got enough time to do.... x y or z'?

This thought was provoked when I was recently glancing through some book recommendations on Time Management. Two or three books included 4000 weeks in the title. 

4000 weeks, where does that number come from? So I quickly did some mental maths forgetting leap years. 4000 weeks is approximately 77 years, or 76.92 is you want to be accurate, but we will round it up to 77 as it makes things easier and 4000 is a nice round number to start with.

How do you spend those 4000 weeks? let's break it down...

Sleeping, this varies from person to person but let us assume that you sleep 7.5 hours a day. You will sleep longer as a baby obviously, but shorter in later life, so to keep things simple we will assume 7.5 hours a day for the whole 77 years! This calculates to about 1255 weeks spent sleeping. 

What else do we do? 

School/Education, we spend about 36 weeks of a year 5 days a week of about a 7.5 hour day for about 17 years going to school.... or about 137 weeks (2.6 years) 

Most of us will go to work, 261 days a year. Not allowing for holidays (annual leave and public holidays) if we assume a working life of 40 years with an 8 hour day, we will spend nearly 500 weeks at work or 9.5 years. 

Watching TV from say the age of 10 for say 3 hours a day, or if it's not watching TV it might be checking social media these days! That consumes another 435 weeks over a life time.

Washing, showering, doing your teeth each day. Say 30 minutes a day, another 84 weeks used up. 

Eating, an hour a day? that adds another 168 weeks 

Take that away from your initial 4000 weeks and you get 1421 weeks left to go on holiday, read, do the DiY, travel to work, exercise, keep up with reading all the posts on Philofaxy etc... or 27 years! 

Spend that time wisely.....