Road Podcast

“ START USING YOUR ”

TIME
 START USING YOUR TIME
Can you remember that one thing you
always wanted to try, but which you never
found the time for? Maybe you wrote it
down on your bucket list, or thought about it
during your New Year's resolutions. No
matter if it's reading that new book, learning
a new language, starting that business idea,
painting that picture, getting into shape, or
playing the guitar. I don't know how to play
the guitar. Is this even a guitar? The point is
these things have been going through your
head for quite a bit, but you never found the
time to give them a shot. But well, I'm telling
you, now is the time. Seriously, now is the
time. We're occupying every minute of our
time with the things we always do. Over the
course of years, we developed an obsession
about productivitydriven routines. Our lives
have become so busy, that we barely find
the time to try new things. And when there
happens to be a moment in which our minds
aren't occupied with anyting and are finally
free, we quickly grab our phone and pretend
to do something important, like scrolling
through social media, looking at memes,
playing games, or watching YouTube videos.
I guess it's okay to watch my videos, right? I
mean, seriously, like when was the last time
you were actually bored? At least I can't
really remember for myself, because I'm
always on my phone, on my laptop, just
distracting myself. The Internet gives us
instant access to anything at any time, and I
believe that's a blessing and a curse at the
same time. On the one side, we have the
opportunity to learn anything we want for
almost no money, but on the other hand, we
easily get lost and distracted by the gigantic
amount of entertainment content which
keeps us from spending time with ourselves.
To be honest, computers and phones, and
any sorts of electronic devices, they already
took over our lives, even if we don't want to
admit it. It's really hard to measure the
average time that we spend on our
electronic devices, but from what I found on
the Internet, we spend an average of 3 hours
and 15 minutes on our phones, and 11 hours
on any sorts of electronic devices, which is
including television, laptop, phone, anything
you can imagine which is electronic, and
entertains you. I can actually check what my
screen time was last week. Probably it's
really really high, and we have 3 hours and
11 minutes, on average. I'm still below
average, but last week, for example, it was...
3 and a half hours on average, which is just
so much time you spend on your phone. But
the even scarier thing is that these amounts
are just the averages per day. If we added it
up, it would be 77 hours per week, 4,000
hours per year, or 320,000 hours in a
lifetime, of an average of 80 years. So in
other words, we spend 13,500 days or 33.5
years, on our screens. With an average
sleeping time of 8 hours, this is 70% of our
time in the digital world. I mean, that's just
crazy, right? Obviously, most of us are forced
to work on screens for our jobs, because it's
just much more efficient than like writing
everything down. As a filmmaker and editor,
I'm working most of the time in front of
screens, I'm writing my scripts on my phone
or on my laptop, I'm editing photos and
videos on my laptop, so it's just an
enourmous amount I'm already spending on
screens just for my work. But the thing is
that even in our free time, we can't really let
go of all these electronic devices. Okay, so
let's just break down what the average
weekday of us looks like. We sleep for 9
hours, get ourselves ready and have
breakfast for one hour, go to work and have
lunch for 9 hours, do household tasks like
buying food or cleaning the house for one
hour, have dinner for one hour, and try to
fall asleep for one hour. That's already 22
hours. So we end up with around 2 hours of
free time, but I guess you already know
where we spend those last 2 hours.
Obviously this graphic would look different
for all of us. Maybe there's less work, more
studying, maybe time for sport or time for
childcare. It always just depends on your
point of life and your habits, but what I'm
trying to say is that this amount of time that
we have each day, 24 hours, is just so easily
filled up with our productivity-driven
routines, that we often forget to take time
for the new things. The phrase "I don't have
time for that" became one of the most
common and most accepted excuses
nowadays. To be honest, it's just about
prioritizing your time. There's enough time
for all of us, we all have 24 hours each day,
but we just need to define what's most
important to us. And I think that most
people forget what's important to them,
because they're just so caught up in their
everyday lives. And that's the reason why it's
so so hard to approach new things and to try
them out, because in our heads, we're
always just... Thinking about the next best
thing to do, we always distract ourselves,
and we never really take that space to really
try out something new. So the graphic I
showed you was our reality for a long time,
but in the last weeks, a lot of things
changed. "Officially designating Coronavirus
as a global pandemic". "It's that there's been
a total lack of supply which seems to
persist". "More than 3 billion people in
almost 70 countries have been asked to stay
at home". Yeah, the Coronavirus is all over
the news, it's all over the countries, it's
everywhere in the world. So, I think the virus
really changed the way of our lives for
everybody, including myself. It was actually a
really really bad timing for me, because I just
quit my job, yeah, my plan was to go
traveling again, I wanted to live abroad and
work there as a freelance and photographer.
But yeah, I quickly recognized that this is not
going to happen in the next few months. So,
after leaving Kempten, which is the town I
used to live in, I moved to my hometown in
the south of Munich, and there, I lived
together with my mum and my brother. In
the beginning, at home, things really didn't
go to plan, as expected. I slept in until noon,
and it already got bright outside, I spent a lot
of time with my cats and watched YouTube
and Netflix for hours, so I tried to distract
myself in any way possible. But after a
couple of days, I realized that these
limitations were not going to be over in a
few weeks. Maybe it will take a few months,
maybe even years for things to go back to
normal, so I knew some things needed to
change. So when I'm feeling stuck, and I
can't really get my ass up to do anything, I
always have the same mindset: focus on the
things you can control, not the things which
are out of your hands. Why should you
occupy your mind with things that are out of
your control? You can't even change them,
so why should you waste your time with it? I
see it this way: if there's one good thing...
Okay, these are 2. If there's one good thing
about the quarantine, it's that we just have a
lot of time. We're not allowed to meet our
friends, we're trapped at home, we have to
work less, so yeah, it's just a lot of time we
have. And it's really easy to get into the
wrong mindset and to just think "most
people aren't doing anything right now, so I
don't have to feel bad if I do nothing". In
some weird way, we are forced into our
comfort zone, and we don't even feel bad
about it. Because of that mindset, it's very
easy to get demotivated, and passively wait
until this whole thing is over. But having that
much free time is actually a very rare
situation, so why not use it to grow as a
person and explore new opportunities,
instead of waiting for our lives to go back to
normal? Why stay passive, if you could
actually be active? So after realizing that,
finally some things started to change. I spent
more quality time with my family, we played
games, cooked together, and I started to run
with my brother every second day for at
least 10 kilometers. I felt like running was a
real game changer for myself, because as
soon as I just got up and did some sport, I
was already motivated to do more things. As
all the gyms closed, I started to work out in
our garden. I finally found time to work on
several video scripts, which I've pushing
further back week by week, and I started a
new online course about digital products,
which is actually really interesting. All of
those are things that I really wanted to do,
but somehow, they always ended up at the
bottom of my to-do list. I guess I even had
more free time than most other people,
because I also quit my job at that time, but
talking to my friends, it turned out that
everybody is kind of like in the same
situation, where they have a lot more time
than usual. So, why am I telling you all of
this? By making this video, I want to
motivate each and everyone of you guys out
there to just make the best out of the
current situation. For most of us, these
limitations give us some headspace, and
finally the opportunity to take more time for
ourselves, and the people around us. I
challenge you to spend time with the people
you love, and to actively try new things
which never got ticked off your bucket list.
Maybe for some of us, it's even like a wake-
up call, to finally have time to re-evaluate
what's important to you, and to make some
changes. To be honest, this point of time is
perfect to develop new habits, because
everything is just so predictable. So yeah,
you have time to just do things repeatedly
and to build up those habits. You go running
for one day, two days, three days a week,
and so on, and eventually you will build up a
good habit of doing something that you
wanted to implement in your life. Probably
some of you guys out there completely
disagree with what I'm saying, because you
just wanna chill, you just wanna take some
time, just like take a breath. That's
completely fine. Like, I'm not telling you that
you should get back to productivity and
work hard and hustle. I'm just telling you
that it's like a really rare situation to have
that much time, so I think we should use it,
and hopefully, this can be a small reminder
and like a kick in the ass for you, guys, to get
up and to do something again. I want you
guys to stay active, instead of just like lying
down there, and just waiting until it's over,
because it's still going to take a lot of time,
probably. So the next months, I'm also
challenging myself to get into some new
things, and one of the biggest projects is
going to be this YouTube channel with you
guys. It's actually been a dream of mine for
such a long time to have this own YouTube
channel and to just create videos, which I'm
really excited about, and to tell inspiring
stories. I want to get more into script writing
and storytelling, and also lighting. This is just
like a really really cheap light that I bought
like 3 years ago, but it's doing alright. But
also, besides filmmaking, I wanna try some
new things, like learning Spanish. I've... I've
been wanting to do that for a long time, but
I never really got into it and I always push it
further back. And also maybe playing the
guitar, I don't know why, but I think it's a
cool instrument, maybe I'm gonna try it,
maybe not. Peace out, goodbye.

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