Keep it in perspective

Even big things look small when you zoom out

Not long ago, I was talking with someone who was thinking about signing up for an art class. This particular class met for two hours on Tuesday nights, and the class ran for 12 weeks.

This person worked full time and had a family, so all the usual stories were bubbling up. Tuesdays would feel busy. Dinner might be a bit rushed. Our would-be artist would be missing out on family time and would be tired at the end of the night.

Look broadly

It seemed like a big time commitment. But was it? Two hours a week for 12 weeks is 24 hours. Even if you add on an hour each week for getting there and back, we are talking 36 hours. There are 8,760 hours in a year. You don’t have to be a math genius to see that 36 hours is a very small proportion of 8,760 hours, or even of the roughly 3,840 waking, non-working hours a person who works 40 hours a week (for 50 weeks) and sleeps 8 hours a night would have available. This person could sign up for the art class in the spring and the fall (24 weeks), add on time for getting there and back each time, and still have 98 percent of their waking, non-working time available for other things.

In other words, when we zoom out, even big things don’t seem so big. It helps to keep everything in perspective.

This is why I recommend looking at time as broadly as possible. Many of us are focused on only the day right in front of us. We have a lot we want to do, and it doesn’t seem to fit in 24 hours. We need to work and sleep and care for our families. We want to exercise, chat with friends, read, do hobbies, hangout with our partners, take an online course, whatever. This won’t all fit on an average Wednesday.

Time is bigger than that

But it doesn’t have to. Time is much bigger than the next 24 hours. The next 168 hours (one week) is more useful for planning purposes, and all of those things could probably fit in 168 hours. But even if things don’t fit in the next week, time is even bigger than that. A lot can fit in 8,760 hours. Even things that feel big as we do them feel small in that context. Spending, say, an hour a day on a job search on top of your regular job, four days a week, is going to feel lengthy in the doing. But four hours a week for, say, 20 weeks, is 80 hours. It’s something but it’s still a small proportion — and hopefully in that time you’d find something that would make the working portion of your life a lot better.

Zoom out and things that seem in conflict may not be so. Zoom out and time is big enough to accommodate a lot. If you want to make something fit, look at the whole context, and you might be surprised at what is possible.

(Interested in learning more about how big time is? Check out Big Time, my newest book, which will be out May 5th. I’m very excited to share this book with the world!)