Spend Your Time Wisely

About 4 months ago, I learned that my friend's mom had cancer and that while there was an amount of hope, it didn't look good. 2 days ago, I found out that another friend's mom has cancer, and that we will find out more in a couple of weeks.

Events like these make you step back and assess what is going on, and where your priorities lie. For one reason or another, time became the commodity that I focused on. Everyone's life contains static that we don't need. Some of it is beyond our control and some of it is self-inflicted.

It seems to me that a worthwhile exercise would be to take a look at what you do in a given week, month, or other time increment and ask yourself a few questions:

• How much of my time and mental bandwidth is consumed by each activity?
  
• Am I getting any value out of these activities?
• Am I getting enough value out of these activities?
• If not, what are the alternatives (including bailing all together), and are they achievable.
  

The answers to these questions are highly individualistic. By no means am I suggesting that everyone needs to spend every waking moment trying to be productive with tangible evidence of value. Some of the best things in life yield no tangible benefit, i.e. spending 4 hours in a car to fish for 7 hours and catch no fish - see last post.

As life goes on, it is easy to layer on one more thing to which we all need to dedicate our time. The key idea is to take a periodic inventory and see if the list of things we are spending our time on is yielding a net benefit, whether tangible or intangible. It's kind of like the kitchen cabinet, there are some things in there that you know you haven't touched in years, and if asked honestly, you couldn't come up with a possible use for at least half of those things. Clearing out the cabinet won't yield any great change, but the next time you open that cabinet and every time after that, you won't have to spend any effort or bandwidth working around the dead weight, in order to get what you are looking for.


Fly of the day:
The Hare's Ear Nymph
http://www.flyfisherman.com/Learn2Tie/haresearnymph/
(Link to Video on page)











Tight Lines,

Dave