#3. Time Affluence and the Pen Stand

We were having a freewheeling discussion when one of our Potentialife India colleagues held up an overfilled pen stand with her right hand and a pink highlighter with her left, as a visual demonstration of a 'problem' most people are perpetually working on:

Time Affluence.

As self-proclaimed driven and passionate individuals with piles of projects and priorities, we all experience a certain sense of feeling 'overfull'. Our calendars, to-do-lists, and mental states would surely indicate this. And still, we're guilty of trying to add that shiny new something to our anyway busy lives – except that it just won't fit!

She rested the pen stand on her desk, and tried pushing the highlighter in with all her force. Some pens moved millimeters, other pens bent slightly out of shape, and finally, the pink highlighter managed to just about stay, but only just.

Most productivity pointers, tips, and tips are like this. They focus on finding ways to get us to do more, push more, and just make it fit either with brute power or unheard of willpower.

But there's another way. Surely you've noticed how every pen stand always has at least a few dried up or broken pens, which brings us to...

This week’s experiment: Clean up your pen stand by discarding the junk:

• Projects that have been lying unactioned for months/ years – can you drop them?
• Routines that you have consistently found difficult to sustain – can you release them?
• Tasks undone for so long that they've lost meaning – can you let them go?

Quite paradoxically, even a habit we've committed to for our own happiness and well-being could backfire and create stress if it puts unreasonable demands on our time. With a profusion of well-intentioned commitments we've made to ourselves, what we need is a rational look at each of them.

There are two ways to feel more financial affluence (make more & spend less), but only one of them works for time affluence, which means giving ourselves the permission to intentionally drop a few balls.