500 Words a Week - Protect Your Space
We are always reachable. Always willing to drop whatever we are doing after hearing a notification come through, be that email, social media or a message. We are awful at protecting our space, our time. Time to think, time to unwind, time to even just stare at a wall and be bored for a bit.
It’s this space we need to be more ruthless in attempting to protect. We need this time to think about what’s going on around us, what we are doing, where we are planning on going. Rather than just drifting through life, allowing everything to be dictated to us and having no say over how we want our life to be.
This was a point also brought up in Essentialism. “We need space to escape in order to discern the essential few from the trivial many”. What Greg is referring to by essential few, is what aspects we want to spend our very limited time on. A thought re-brought up from Essentialism and a few podcasts is the limited amount of time we have. We need to be better with how we spend it.
We also need to be conscious that we do spend some of this time looking after ourselves. “The best asset we have for making a contribution to the world is ourselves” – Greg McKeown.
Recently I’ve been trying something simple, to turn my phone off for an hour every evening.
When I thought of this, I used to think of productivity. Turning off the phone would enable me to focus, to get stuff done. However, what I didn’t expect would be how much more I get from other tasks, even if it’s just watching Netflix in the evenings. By turning off the phone, I’m able to concentrate more on what I’m watching. Allowing me to enjoy that little bit of down time more, rather than just endless going back and forth between scrolling on my phone and watching television. I recently read that if your concentration is split, you’re constantly going back and forth between two or more things, your IQ drops more than from the effects of smoking cannabis.
It seems a simple concept, protecting our space. It goes towards trying to be more present in each moment, something every self-help book will talk about, to the point that we may feel this is all these books talk about. However, there is merit to it. We are living in an overstimulated and distracted world. Three books I read over the summer that highlight this topic: Deep Work, Hyperfocus and Essentialism.
More importantly, protecting our space just gives us time. It lets us check in with ourselves. When was the last time you took some space to just sit and think about you?
