Skip to main content

"Maybe next week"

Image
By
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.
Read more about:

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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where is the best place to live?

By
Where we live determines a lot about our life.  So today I'm going to share a resource that can help you decide where might be a good place to live.  It started with an article ranking Brisbane suburbs from 1 to 260 . That ranking was based on a set of 17 factors. Here are some of them. But all 17 may not be relevant for you. And some might matter more than others. So they developed a tool where you can rank the 5 factors most important to you and it will give you a personalised list of Brisbane suburbs that would be the best for you - based on those factors. There are also  Sydney and Melbourne  versions. On the results page, there's also a map that colour-codes each suburb by star rating, for each factor. For instance here's the map for public transport. Five-star suburbs are in blue. When you click on a suburb, you get the name and the star rating of that suburb - for whichever factor you select. I find this to be so enlightening. I choose not to own a car. Some...
Post a Comment
Read more

Less Clutter More Cash - now available

By
Do you feel like you have too much stuff? Is your home full of things you never use? Would you like to swap them for cash? We did My wife and I have sold more than 550 items online as we downsize and we've learnt a bit along the way. I've put some of our best tips into this handy ebook. I hope you can use these tips so you too can have less clutter and more cash. Enter your email address below to receive the book for free. Less Clutter More Cash Get my new ebook for free. PS. This will subscribe to the But Wait There's Less email list, so you'll know when the new updated version of the book is available. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Post a Comment
Read more

The Latte Factor

By
For the first time ever I'm reviewing a novel. Latte Factor is a short story  - around 120 pages - and is equal parts of inspirational story and financial education. The combination of the two is quite rare, and done quite nicely. The story is about Zoey Daniels, associate editor for a travel magazine. Although she's never been outside the USA  - "a travel editor who's never travelled". She struggles with money and is considering a higher-paying job at the company her friend Jessica works for. The job would provide more income, but would also be more stressful and demanding. She already has a nightmare about being on an increasingly-fast treadmill that she struggles to stay on. Her current boss Barbara - aware only of the money situation - suggests she talk to Henry at the coffee shop. This peculiar suggestion is where Zoey's life begins to turn a corner. Spoiler Alert Being a book of fiction, I don't want to spoil the story for you. It's a book you ca...
Post a Comment
Read more