168

Credit: May1985

A week has 168 hours.

When you sleep eight hours per night, you spend fifty-six hours per week sleeping. Assuming you work an average of forty hours per week, you are left with seventy-two hours you can fill anyway you want. Seventy-two hours is three full days.

These seventy-two hours are entirely within your control.

You can take some of those to work more, which many of us do. You can use them for other people in your life, like family and friends, and you can use them exclusively for activities that serve you alone.

There’s a wealth of time at our disposal, more than we often realize. It’s time to start living more intentionally, to use these seventy-two hours in ways that truly matter to us.

Seventy-two hours is a lot of time. We’re not spending it as often as we would like to. Social media, sitting in traffic, countless and useless meetings, waiting for whatever we’re waiting for, or other stuff we have no clue about.

It all starts with self-awareness. To be more intentional about our time, we first need to understand how we’re currently spending it. When I coach individuals on improving their work efficiency, I always begin by asking them to record their daily activities for two weeks. This exercise, coupled with measuring the energy gained or lost during each…