Control the Inputs, Not the Outcomes
In this visual representation of your life, you are at the center of the three domains. Like every valuable thing, you require maintenance and care, which takes time. Just as you wouldn’t blow off a meeting with your boss, you should never bail on appointments you make with yourself. After all, who’s more critical to helping you live the kind of life you want than you?
Exercise, sleep, healthy meals, and time spent reading or listening to an audiobook are all ways to invest in ourselves. Some people value mindfulness, spiritual connection, or reflection, and may want time to pray or meditate. Others value skillfulness and want time alone to practice a hobby.
Taking care of yourself is at the core of the three domains because the other two depend on your health and wellness. If you’re not taking care of yourself, your relationships suffer. Likewise, your work isn’t its best when you haven’t given yourself the time you need to stay physically and psychologically healthy.
We can start by prioritizing and timeboxing “you” time. At a basic level, we need time in our schedules for sleep, hygiene, and proper nourishment. While it may sound simple to fulfill these needs, I must admit that before I learned to timebox my day, I was guilty of spending many late nights at work, after which I’d quickly grab a double cheeseburger, curly fries, and a decadent chocolate shake for dinner—a far cry from the healthy lifestyle I envisioned.
By setting aside time to live out your values in the “you” domain, you will have the time to reflect on your calendar and visualize the qualities of the person you want to be. With your body and mind strong, you will also be much more likely to follow through on your promises.
You might be thinking, “It’s all well and good to schedule time for ourselves, but what happens when we don’t accomplish what we want to, despite making the time?”
A few years ago, I started waking up at three o’clock every morning. Over the years I’d read many articles about the importance of rest and knew that the research was unequivocal—we need quality sleep. I’d toss and turn, disappointed that I wasn’t following through on my plan to get seven to eight hours of shut-eye. It was on my schedule, so why wasn’t I asleep? It turns out that sleeping wasn’t completely under my control. I couldn’t help the fact my body chose to wake me up, but I could control what I did in response.
At first, I did what many of us do when things don’t go as planned—I freaked out. I’d lie in bed, thinking about how bad it was that I wasn’t sleeping and how groggy I was going to feel in the morning, and then I’d start thinking of all the things I had to do the next day. I’d mull over these thoughts until I could think of nothing else. Ironically, I wasn’t falling back asleep because I was worried about not falling back asleep—a common cause of insomnia.
Once I realized my rumination was itself a distraction, I began to deal with it in a healthier manner. Specifically, if I woke up, I’d repeat a simple mantra, “The body gets what the body needs.” That subtle mind-set shift took the pressure off by no longer making sleep a requirement. My job was to provide my body with the proper time and place to rest—what happened next was out of my control. I started to think of waking up in the middle of the night as a chance to read on my Kindle and stopped worrying about when I’d fall back asleep.2 I assured myself that if I wasn’t tired enough to fall asleep right at that moment, it was because my body had already gotten enough rest. I let my mind relax without worry.
You see where this is leading, don’t you? Once my rumination stopped, so did my sleepless nights. I soon started regularly falling back asleep in minutes.
There’s an important lesson here that goes well beyond how to get enough sleep. The takeaway is that, when it comes to our time, we should stop worrying about outcomes we can’t control and instead focus on the inputs we can. The positive results of the time we spend doing something is a hope, not a certainty.
The one thing we control is the time we put into a task.
Whether I’m able to fall asleep at any given moment or whether a breakthrough idea for my next book comes to me when I sit down at my desk isn’t entirely up to me, but one thing is for certain: I won’t do what I want to do if I’m not in the right place at the right time, whether that’s in bed when I want to sleep or at my desk when I want to do good work. Not showing up guarantees failure.
We tend to think we can solve our distraction problems by trying to get more done each minute, but more often the real problem is not giving ourselves time to do what we say we will. By timeboxing “you” time and faithfully following through, we keep the promises we make to ourselves.
REMEMBER THIS
• Schedule time for yourself first. You are at the center of the three life domains. Without allocating time for yourself, the other two domains suffer.
• Show up when you say you will. You can’t always control what you get out of time you spend, but you can control how much time you put into a task.
• Input is much more certain than outcome. When it comes to living the life you want, making sure you allocate time to living your values is the only thing you should focus on.
2 The Kindle e-reader is less harmful to sleep than other devices. Anne-Marie Chang, Daniel Aeschbach, Jeanne F. Duffy, and Charles A. Czeisler, “Evening Use of Light-Emitting EReaders Negatively Affects Sleep, Circadian Timing, and Next-Morning Alertness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 4 (January 27, 2015): 1232, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1418490112.