“What Matters” — statistically speaking, of course

Birth to 85 Years (I’ll take it) = 744,600 hours

50 Years old to 85 Years = 306,600 hours

Me, sitting here right this moment to 85 years old = 303,205 hours

After writing this article to 85 years old = 303,203 hours

Do you see where I’m going with this? Yeah, me neither; kidding. What should I do with my 303,204 hours left on earth? What should I devote my time to, or better yet, what is deserving of my time?

Work

Family

Entertainment (with friends, minus family)

Spirituality

Personal Education (Reading, Writing, Study)

Exercise/Health

Sleep

Let’s look at sleep. Sleep’s important — duh. Let’s take sleep out my remaining hours — for kicks and giggles, and a few snickers and zzz’s. That leaves me with 214,773 hours, if I sleep 7 hours a night — sleeping that many hours costs me 88,431 hours of my life. Hmmm, what if I wanted more time to work on things and slept 6 hours a night — that means I would be sleeping 75,798 hours over the balance of my hypothetical life. That a savings of 12,633 hours.

Fun fact, did you know that a normal work week is 40 hours (again, duh), which results in approximately 2,040 hours a year at a full-time job. If we look at the balance of sleeping one less hour a night, again over my hypothetical life, would result in just over six years of full-time employment.

So I ask again, what is deserving of my life? If I take all of my time and divided it among my categories, what percentages would I allocate to each one? Let me look at how I am allocating it right now.

What do you think? Does this look familiar? Am I skewed somewhere? Looking at these numbers is causing me to think a little more about my time. Put simply, this is a charted expression of how I view what’s important to me. It would be nice if we only needed to sleep a couple of hours a night, dropping that percentage to about 10%. Imagine what I could do with that time! I could read more, write more, spend a little more time at the gym, spend time with my wife, my kids, and the grandkids.

If you mapped your life-hours and percentages, would it surprise you? Would it make you reconsider some of your percentages and where you are spending your time?