Where Are You Spending Your Life On?

My work is eating my life away!

I just made a schedule of my usual week.. typical 8 hours work time, gym, odd lessons. Assuming I sleep daily 10 hours a day, that leaves me with 14 hours to spare. And based on those basic assumptions, I came to realize that an astounding 40% of my typical waking hour is studiously and regularly spent in the office, doing the work things that I do. Maybe that doesn't sound like an intimidating breakdown, but if and when you see it in a chart version, it definitely looks intimidating to me. Its looks like a monster waiting to eat up the rest of your life; spanning several blocks and several rows and taking up more space in the piece of chart than you'd like to admit. Its like finally realizing one huge chunk of your life is being eaten away - and its not a pretty realization.

Within those typical 8-hour per day, 5 days per week work schedule, what would you ideally like to accomplish? Realizing the huge percentage of time that I put into work, I can't help but think of all those time spent procastinating in my seat, or trying to get myself to work up my braindead status to finish all those mini projects... and that those sometimes end in a depressingly big, black, height-spanning-to-the-heavens immovable wall.

A microcosm? It is, when you realize you've spent close to 40% of every week, sitting in your cubicle. And then you realize you'll be doing the same thing next week, and the week after, and the week after that. And you're going to realize that you'll be spending 40% of those 52 weeks in a year in precisely the same manner and percentage (no, holidays don't count; those holidays and overtimes even themselves out.) That's 40% of your time in the past 365 days spent working. That's a whooping 40% of your life, after getting your bachelor's degree, devoted to your company environment. And if you've been working for more than 4 years, it will suddenly occur to you... that's simply A LOT OF TIME.

Suddenly I realize that's a absurd chunk of my existence. And I don't want to face the fact that I've just spend 40% of my life... just working.

To put things in more prespective. These are potential average figures, but they are more or less a reflection of my life at the moment:

40.0% Working
08.0% Necessities (Brushing your teeth, taking a bath, morning and nightly stuff)
08.0% Commuting and travel
10.5% Eating, Dining (No this does not include partying)
12.0% Exercising (Going to the gym, jogging, sports)
06.0% Watching TV, movies, reading books
----------------------------------------------------------
15.5% Left to do other stuff (Fill in your blank.. talking over the phone with friends... partying, whatver)

And that's a remaining 15.5% of my waking time left to do whatever else that I want....

A shrinking, crazy feeling has occured to me while gazing at that big 40% of my time spent working... There is strangely something wrong with that figure.

But what does this all mean? Think about how you spend your time, and think about the enormity and importance of those sets of figures...

To be continued...