As humans, we love to complicate things. I know what you’re thinking right now, not me. Well, unfortunately, it’s true for all of us. We make hundreds of decisions in a day, if not more and a lot of the time the decisions we’re making or struggling to make while depleting our mental energy, at the end of the day, don’t have a really big impact on the quality of the day.
We tend to like to be involved and I suppose this is rooted in our ancestral roots of the hunter-gatherer communal bonds that once were. There’s no problem being included or involved in something, the problem begins when we’re caught up doing shit that we don’t need to do. The next time you have the opportunity to relax and sit back – carefully watch what other people do or do not do for that matter. Try to observe what they do and why they’re doing it and ask yourself this question in the moment – do they really need to be doing this or is this better suited for someone else or not done at all?
It’s been said that we have an underlying motivation for every action we take. It’s also been said that that motivation can somehow be traced back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For every decision we make we’re gaining or trying to gain something from it. Even the charitable or selfless acts have a tieback to how they strengthen our needs as individuals. But do we make decisions throughout the day that help us develop and grow those needs in a way that we can become the best that we can become? Or do we waste time on mindless stuff that makes us feel less adequate?
We’re living in a different world. It’s not a doom and gloom world but rather a world of infinite choices and possibilities. This creates a new set of challenges because you have to decide what you’re going to spend and invest your time on. Scrolling through Facebook is not going to allow you to be the best you can be. You can make every excuse about why you do it, i.e. it helps me unwind, I like to see my friends and family members at the end of the day, or it’s your way to “catch up” with things but none of these are true. They create a false sense of community and although they allow you to stay in touch, there’s no debate that a real face to face conversation trumps any amount of digital communication out there. Why? Because computers don’t do a great job of conveying the instant emotions and feelings behind the interaction of two people.
We have access to everything and therefore can DO anything but just because we can DO anything doesn’t mean we should. We have access to fat studios where you can lay on a table for 30 minutes wearing a spacesuit contraption and it will “sculpt” your entire midsection. For a few dollars and 30 minutes, you can have washboard abs. People DO this type of dumb shit all the time looking for a way to be better or make the path easier to where they want to be, but along the way, they waste time and money doing stupid shit.
Professionals DO things every day that they don’t need to do. A lot of the time they are only doing these things because they strategically look at a clock and figure out that if they DO this it will eat up about 2 hours of the workday, then there’s an hour for lunch and then they can do the only really important thing in their job today that will probably only take 45 minutes to finish. You get the point but it’s worth understanding how much time we spend on dumb shit and taking a step back to ask yourself – do I really need to be doing this right now?