Two Hours

A friend of my mother’s sent me a presentation on using one’s time wisely. The presentation was okay and had some interesting points, and some obvious ones. About twenty slides into the show, a question caught my attention.

If you had two extra hours every day, what would you do with them?

My first instinct was, “I’d write my novel.” I’ve been trying to write this novel for the last year and it’s definitely not progressing as quickly as I would like it to. Having left the other one incomplete, I’m scared this book will face the same fate and I really don’t want it to.

But then I realized that I put off writing my novel cause it’s so hard. It requires a lot of my energy to get it all on paper and I tend to put it off until the last minute, so if I had an extra two hours everyday, I doubt I’d actually spend them on my novel.

My next answer was “I’d read.” Another bottomless pit. No matter how much I read, there are always more books to read and I continuously wish for more time. I have a minimum of eight books checked out from the library at any one time and I simply cannot go through them fast enough. Reading was definitely a valid choice for me.

The more I thought about the question, the more I wondered the answers. I wondered what I did with the twenty-four hours I get each day. Don’t get me wrong, I maximize my time a lot. In a week, I manage to volunteer in two places, work in an investment bank, take six classes, read two books, write my novel and at least another essay or short story, see a movie, watch twenty hours of TV, write my site at least five times, and sleep a minimum of eight hours. I am not worried that I’m not getting enough done, I’m just curious how many hours of my day each task takes. And if I had two more hours, what would be the best task for me to do?

Hang out with friends more, I think. Most of my friends are just as busy as I am and we rarely seem to see each other as often as we say we want to. If we all had two extra hours, maybe it’d be easier to find the time to meet.

I guess I’m better at making a list of things I wouldn’t do with the extra hours. I wouldn’t work or sleep. I wouldn’t sit on the couch and watch TV. I wouldn’t exercise.

The question of what I would do is hard to answer cause I like to do so many things and my list of to-dos never ends. Actually, it never even goes below fifteen items. So another two hours would maybe allow me to keep my list at thirteen items or eleven if I wanted to be optimistic. Which shows me that I am bad at this as I would not appreciate the two added hours as much as I should.

I wonder how many hours would have to be added before I just can’t think of anything more to do. Since I adore reading, I venture to say that the answer would be infinite. There aren’t enough hours you can add to my day.

I think that says a lot of not so great things about me or my lifestyle, but for now, I am choosing not to concentrate on that too much. Instead, I’m going to go and use the next three hours of my day on a dinner and a movie.

What would you do with an extra two hours each day?

Previously? Normal.