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"Maybe next week"

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Australian singer Guy Sebastian has a new song out and it got me thinking.



It's clearly an ode to a friend whose "book ran out of pages". Now he wishes he could have said "out of all the moments in my life the ones I got to share with you were probably my favourite."

In a later verse he puts his finger on the problem. "We fill up all our days with workin' ... just to make ends meet. Too busy to call, we'll catch up next week. And then it gets to next week and we say maybe next week...". Obviously this isn't good (as the singer now realises).

We don't have that many weeks

All this talk of pages and weeks reminds me of Tim Urban's Your Life in Weeks. Tim graphically represents each week in our life with a box. 52 boxes across and 90 boxes down. Shockingly, this grid of our life fits easily on a page.

In the follow-up post The Tail End he did the maths of how many times he'll get to do the things he loves. He includes baseball games and swims at the beach before looking at the time with those he loves.


He estimates how many more days he'll see his parents and it's not that many. Compared to the number of days he spent with them as a kid and as a young adult, Tim calculates that he's in the last 7% of his time with them. And it's not much more for his sisters.

What to do?

Tim has his own suggestions - living near people you love (so you see them more) and prioritising the people (or activities) that are important to you.

I reckon many of us struggle to name the five most important things in our life - let alone match our schedule to those things. It's probably another reason why advertisers get us to buy so much junk. If we don't have a clear idea of what's important to us, it's so much easier for them to convince us that what they're selling is important. Then "we fill up all our days with workin' ... just to make ends meet."

By buying less junk and stuff we don't need, we don't need to be as obsessed with working all the time and we can make space for the people and things we care about.
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Comments

  1. Unknown31 July 2019 at 11:22

    Love this reminder! Thank you for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. david2 August 2019 at 09:57

    You're welcome. :) There'll be more tips about happiness coming up. You can make sure you see them by subscribing to future posts (top of the page). :)

    ReplyDelete

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