Beating Time Scarcity
Article: Lessons: Living Without Time
One of my first articles I read that reflected on my life lived before, this got me a very important lesson for living my day by day life, yet I still have a hard time sometimes with reminding myself the essence of it.
Time and our perception of it.
Constantly encapsulating life to predetermined calendar blocks can overwhelm.
Excercise: Drop time for good for a week. Reserve a week, where you do not travel, you are just home, do not schedule anything in your calendar, just do whatever you feel like.
Scarcity: having less than we feel we need
It's a biological reflex that was supposed to help survival. It creates an obsessional focus on the thing you lack that suppresses everything else.
Some scarcities can be productive, like deadlines or limiting options to eliminate drowning in them.
Minute Wise, Year Foolish
Checking the time compulsively is no less of a distraction than checking email compulsively. Flow needs timelessness.
Paycheck to Paycheck
A responsible person would think that people who live this way lack self-control, lazy or stupid. But this is reverse:
Scarcity measurably lowers your fluid intelligence (IQ, problem solving, etc), your self-control and your discipline, and triggers short-term thinking.
Ironically, you are stripped the very skills you need to get out of scarcity.
The less time you have, the more carefully you need to manage it, but the harder it is to manage.
This is a tough situation. How to resolve? Insert the reminder whether these are facts or just your perceptions
The less time you feel you have, the more carefully you feel you need to manage it, but the harder it
isfeels to manage.
Shift from scarcity to investment mindset.
- Eliminate repetitive B-list activities
- Doing things right Once
- Produce consistent, quality work
Look out for this dissonance: "money isn’t a measure of self-worth" (true), and "money isn’t a worthy goal" (false).
Opposite of Scarcity
“For me, the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It’s enough. I’m enough.”
- Brené Brown
To escape my scarcity traps, I just need to realize:
I will never have all the time to do everything I want to do. But I will always have enough time to do the few things that truly matter.
Ref:
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Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much Why do successful people get things done at the last minute? Why does poverty persist? Why do organizations get stuck firefighting? Why do the lonely find it hard to make friends? These questions seem unconnected, yet Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir show that they are all examples of a mind-set produced by scarcity.
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“Do It Now” (Steve Pavlina) and “Single-Handling” (Brian Tracy). Choose the most important thing, and work on it till it’s done. The trick is to overcome time scarcity first, so that you feel you have the time to finish.