How you spend time affects your mental health

One of the most brutal and painful reality about life is that we cannot be here forever, hence we are compelled to make decisions on the best use of time since there is time and season for everything under the sun.

Quite as expected, we also live with the consequences of our choices, which many of us may not like, especially when we feel there is a gap between what we spend time on and those things that are deeply important to us.

Putting first things first is an issue at the very heart of life. Life is a great challenge; and the most important resource that must be well utilised is time, which is intricately tied to our mental well-being. As we navigate through the seasons of life, the pertinent question with grave consequence on our mental health is how best we had used our time.

The unfortunate thing about time is that once expended, it cannot be recalled. Our struggle to do the best within the framework of time compels us to harmonise two powerful tools that direct our lives: the clock and the compass.

The clock represents our commitments, appointments, schedules, goals and activities; while the compass represents our vision, values, perception, mission, conscience and direction, especially what we feel is important.

The legendary Professor of Organisation Behaviour and management consultant, Stephen R. Covey, observed that when there is a gap between the clock and the compass, especially when we feel that what we do doesn’t contribute to what is most important in our lives, it could ultimately result into profound mental health issues. Some may feel trapped and controlled by other people or situations and always responding to crises, putting out fires and never making time to do what is most important.

For others, the pain is a vague discomfort emanating from feeling guilty as they feel disconnected from what they are doing. Some may feel empty outright, especially for those who have defined happiness solely in terms of professional and financial achievement, discovering later that those things do not bring inner satisfaction and fulfillment. They are usually absorbed in the ascent, wonderful moments and miss opportunities to invest in vital relationships.

As a consequence of our attempt to close the gap between the clock and the compass, time management as a field was born. About three generations of time management can be identified, which have brought us a long way toward increased effectiveness, although the psychological gap still remains in majority of the people.

The first generation is based on reminders characterised by simple notes and checklists. The second generation is one of planning and preparation characterised by calendar, appointments and identifying deadlines. The third generation involves planning, prioritising and controlling involving clarification of values. However, despite the progressive adaptation of these time management methods, the gap still remains, which poses a great challenge for mental capital development in management.

Time is a constant resource, hence the concept of its management is a misnomer. Time only becomes an enemy when self is mismanaged within the constant factor of time. The overall philosophy of time management deals with the idea of it as chronos, where time is seen linear and sequential. This is the concept of the clock and philosophy of time management as a discrete entity.

However, another Greek terminology is kairos, through which time is viewed as an inner experience and as an existential parameter. Chronos could become destructive, especially when it is not balanced with kairos. Often times, we get carried away by the assessment of our lives based on chronology alone and we end up with midlife crisis, empty nest syndrome and may other psychological crisis because we estimate our lives from the paradigm of the clock. Young folks aspire to be multi-billionaires before the age of 40, and this propels a good number of them to engage in questionable activities that invariably violate their conscience and they may end up developing mental health problems.

The kairo paradigm challenges us as human beings to interrogate our values and consciously invest our time on what we consider to be important. The quadrant of crisis describes a situation of doing what is important and urgent all the time when we refuse to do what is important but not immediately urgent.

But a good deal of self-awareness and prioritisation is crucial to engage our lives from the quadrant of proactivity where we invest our lives in doing what is very important but do not appear immediately urgent; but if neglected can push us into crisis and damage our mental health.

The quadrant of pro-activity involves activities like preparation, prevention, value clarification, planning, relationship building, recreation and empowerment. These are activities of self-management and not time management.