In today’s entry, I’m going to answer a couple of questions on escapism and time equity/time management.
Regarding the Stop Living Lith Your Problems and Start Solving Them and Time is Equity – A Different Perspective On Time Management posts, you may ask:
Does it count as escapism every time I’m doing a leisurely activity? What if I come home from work and watch 5 hours of the tv with my family?
It definitely does not qualify as escapism every time you’re doing an activity. It only qualifies as escapism when you’re using it to escape the pressures of the real world. Odds are that if you’re carrying on with a leisurely activity that doesn’t involve you creating any kind of value, then you are likely using it as an escape mechanism.
I would certainly hope you’re not coming home from work and watching tv for 5 hours with your family every day. I could understand maybe once a week. If you are doing this every day, especially if you have kids, I highly recommend you cease immediately. You are training your kids to believe that watching that much tv every day is acceptable and conditioning them to believe that it’s normal. For seemingly the most part, our society is conditioned to believe it’s acceptable to go home from work and watch tv until you go to bed (or fall asleep in front of the tv). This escapism form of behavior has become a social norm.
If you are perfectly happy with your life and can’t imagine it possibly be any better, then there’s no need for you to stop watching 5 hours of tv a day with your family, although there are certainly more creative and fulfilling ways to spend time with your family. However, if you aren’t 100% absolutely satisfied with your life, and if you think there’s so much as even a remote chance that you would like to improve your life, then I suggest that you explain to your family that you’re going to significantly reduce your tv watching in order to pursue more fulfilling activities that involve creating value in an effort to better yourself and your life. Perhaps you can even come up with such activities that you can still include your family in. In regard to the Time is Equity – A Different Perspective On Time Management post, a reader asks:
How does shaving off 15 minutes of my morning routine give me an extra 15 minutes in the evenings? I’ll just sleep 15 minutes later in the mornings.
I think I can safely say that most people I know would probably say that too. I think a certain amount of the response “I’ll just sleep 15 minutes later..” is conditioned by society. One of the first things a person needs to do if they want to improve themselves is to learn to start recognizing actions, thoughts, behaviors, responses, and any other things that you can think of which are conditioned, then begin working hard to eliminate all of them.
I could have left off “in the evenings” and simply said it would give you an extra 15 minutes of free time. Perhaps then, you might see that you’re still getting the 15 extra minutes of free time. You’re simply choosing to use that time to sleep. Could you not go to bed 15 minutes later, to prevent using that extra time to sleep?
Realistically though, if you are so tired that you think you’d sleep for that extra 15 minutes, it sounds like you’re not getting enough sleep as it is and should probably be going to bed earlier. Sleep is one of the body’s most important needs in order to function at a high level of productivity, and certainly to improve as a person.
Sufficient quality sleep is crucial to optimal brain function, processing power, memory, and many other processes. Thus it only makes sense that if you want to better yourself, you should try your best to get sufficient, quality sleep each night, so that you can perform at your (currently) highest possible levels both physically and mentally each and every day.
I hope you will benefit from these answers.
