Tag Archives: Excuses

Time and TV

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“I don’t have any time”, “I’m too busy”, very common phrases these days I either hear or overhear on a daily basis.  I’ve known traditionally the TV is the biggest consumer of people’s time and did a little research on just how much time TV consumes.  I think you’ll be quite surprised what I found by heading to the ultimate guide on TV watching, the Nielsen Cross Platform Report. 

I’m not going to go over the whole report, you can do that here.  What you’ll be shocked to learn is overall TV viewership has increased 22 minutes per month per person over the last year.  The highest quintile is clocking in nearly TEN hours per day!  The newest trend that is starting to take note is streaming video online and this too is measured since more and more people are doing that.

Nielsen Cross Platform Report Q1 2011

You’ll see on the above report the highest quintile in 2011 Q1 is 598 average daily minutes for 2+ people.  Divide that by 30 days and divide that by 2 and you get the nearly 10 hours per day they are talking about.  The report is quite interesting however the overall summary on time spent watching TV is that people spend a lot of time doing it!

Those who say they are to busy for the gym, to busy to hang out, to busy to change things about their life, to busy to read, to busy to cook/eat healthy, to busy to involve their kids in other activities or join them in activities, to busy to clean, to busy to walk the dog/take are of animals, to busy for your spouse/date night, and the list goes on and on.  People use this wimpy excuse of “I’m to busy” and for the most of us that’s a crock of you know what.

If you’ve ever said your to busy for whatever, check your TV watching habit and I’ll bet you you can cut out just a few hours a night or even a week and you’ll have more time on your hands for those things that are more important than the boob tube. 

Lets do a little math for fun…(I’ll round down to 9 hours and keep that constant)

  • 9 Hours a day x 7 days a week = 63 Hours a week of TV
  • 63 Hours a week x 52 weeks in a year = 3,276 hours of TV a year
  • 3,276 hours divide by 24 hours = 136.5 days of TV watching
  • 136.5 days x 10 years (10 years is within that demographic range) = 1,365 days of TV watching
  • 1,365 days of TV watching divide by 365 days = 3.74 years of TV watching in 10 years.

Now that is pretty damn scary when you get down to how many years of TV watching are in 10 years.  Something to think about, however no matter how slice and dice the numbers, people are watching WAY to much TV.

watching_tv

Time Broke

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The-Time-ExcuseI’ve spoken and posted articles like this http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20110420/canadians-financial-status-survey-110420/ many times however what’s missing is that while people may be financially broke, to the point they cannot even save money, they are also time broke.

What do I mean by time broke? I mean just that, people are constantly saying I don’t have enough time in the day, I don’t have time to work out, I don’t have time for another activity, I don’t have time for this or that.  The funny thing about being time broke is that unlike being broke financially, you can fix time broke very quickly.  I think people use time as an excuse all the time instead of actually understanding where they spend their time.  I did a post in October about time and how much time people actually have and it was quite shocking.  We have more than we think we do.

Time as an excuse is the weakest excuse in the book not to do something.  For example it’s an excuse I hear a lot when I talk about my recent gym training.  People mention all the time I wish I could work out, I just don’t have time for anything else in my life. That’s such horse crap!  I thought the same thing as well.  Lindsay and I are obviously busy with our business in the evenings (by removing our t.v. watching time) and I thought we would not have the time for me to go to the gym.  We sat down one weekend and actually went through our schedule and was able to find at minimum 3 evenings of 1 1/2 hours to spend at the gym as well as any time on the weekend.  Now how hard was it to find that time?  It wasn’t, it was removing the excuse, looking at our calendar, making it a priority, and putting it into action.  Something so many of us are to lazy to do I find.

So what if people really are legitimately busy with say a job that demands more than the 40 hours, typically around 50-60 at a minimum if you include driving time (not including OT which most of us all work freely), and then a second job and maybe a few other hobbies or other life events and they really don’t have time to add say something like the gym in, but they really want to.  Well wouldn’t you want to explore another option to help you recover that time back into your life?  Or would you rather just continue complaining about how you have little time in your life and keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?  See the definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results, so maybe most of us are insane? :) Something to think about.

Anyway we were tired of wasting our time and not getting something back for it which is why we are building this business so that we can gain our time back.  We’ve already created time in Lindsay’s life to become a stay at home mom WITH options.  Our kids will NEVER know what a daycare looks like and I’m proud of that.  Now we are working on freeing up my time so we can spend it together as a family and not have that time excuse ever again.

What are you doing in your life to remove the time excuse you’ve been saying to your friends and family?

Time, Plenty of It

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TimeI’ve been looking at time in a whole new light over the last 1 1/2 years as I’ve been working on my personal growth.  I remember saying a lot over the last 5-10 years of just how busy we were with various things and finding myself frustrated cause I couldn’t fit everything in.  Since reading success books like “The Magic of Thinking Big” and a few others, I’ve learnt how to steward time a lot more and take control of it.  Time isn’t an excuse in our household anymore as we’ve become a lot more efficient with it.

I know a few people think we are always busy and a lot of them think we are consumed solely with our business.  To be honest that couldn’t be further from the truth and I’ll tell you where we’ve changed our priorities.  Instead of spending on average 20 hours watching TV we’ve used that time and decided to put that towards our business.  So while it may seem like we are “busy” we’ve only changed priorities.  Now that’s not to say we don’t watch TV, we just PVR it and watch it when its convenient for us. 

I think a lot of us out there could learn to steward time more efficiently so that we don’t come up with that lame excuse of “I just don’t have time”, cause in my opinion too many people use that.  Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying I’m higher then thou, this is my blog and my opinion so take your negative attitude elsewhere.  I’m just observing what I’ve experienced in the last 1 1/2 years and what I see when paying more attention to people.  Something else people probably should spend more time doing is paying attention to people more.  That’s another blog entry for another day.

Figure out where you spend your time and take a hard look and ask yourself are you really that “busy”?