How do you spend your time?

When interviewing people I like to ask the same few questions, to really capture who that person is right now. One question I tend to ask is particularly powerful: “How do you spend your time?” When someone is posed with this query, as direct yet innocuous as it is, (s)he usually pauses to reflect. We are often so involved with our own lives that we don’t realize how we are living them. Do you work for the majority of your waking hours? How much do you sleep? Do you devote any time to interests or hobbies, or are you at the mercy of your phone and its arsenal of attention-demanding apps?  How much time do you spend with family? When you actually write down what you did each day, and how much time you spent on each activity, what you see can be surprising. I find it to be a great strategy for evaluating my direction. Because although the “I don’t have time” mantra is cited by many, the fact is we all have the same amount of time: there are twenty-four hours in each day. A lot of people engage in regular activities without consciously making a choice. It can help to pose this question to ourselves, to check-in, to ensure we are living our life the way we want. We are what we think about, what we repeatedly do. We are how we spend our time. Thus I regularly try to ask myself: “How are you spending your time?"