Are You Building Your Life or Just Maintaining It?🐹 🎡

We all have certain things we need to do to keep ourselves afloat in life. We need to earn money to pay the bills 💵, get adequate sleep, do life admin and take care of all the other things that keep life functioning.

The downside to all of these activities is that they consume time.

And this can lead to a thinking trap 🤔...

“Why not use my spare time to work more and, therefore, increase my earnings? Or perhaps I could get even further ahead with my life admin?”

On the surface, this can seem like a very sensible decision. You can see a clear and immediate benefit: more money coming in, more things ticked off your to-do list, and perhaps a feeling that you're getting ahead.

But there is a potential downside.

You can end up trading your time and energy for relatively small gains, while your life itself remains broadly the same.

If you're totally happy with your life and your work-life balance is already dialled in, then using some spare time in this way could absolutely make sense 👍

However, if you want to significantly improve your life — and you're especially ambitious — you could be missing out on an extremely valuable opportunity.

You Need Time to Direct Your Life

In your life, you get to play the role of director, actor and editor.

The actor gets things done.

The editor tweaks and refines what is already happening.

But the director steps back and asks bigger questions:

Where are we actually going? What are we building? What needs to change? What could our life look like if we took a completely different approach or created a new habit?

If you choose to trade all of your available working time for money, you can lose the opportunity to direct.

You might become very good at acting and editing — working hard, completing tasks and continually making small improvements — but you no longer have the time and energy resources to coordinate the construction of significant new parts of your life.

You don't have the space to climb difficult mountains with enormous potential gains on the other side.

And this is why I personally have non-negotiable time blocked out in my calendar for big-picture planning and decision-making.

This has been pivotal in transforming my life and building my business.

Zoom Out Before You Zoom Back In

When you create protected space to step back, you can look at the areas of your life where there is untapped growth potential.

You can then honestly reflect on what's happening and come up with a practical plan for how to tackle it.

Perhaps you want to transform your dating life so that you have a much greater chance of finding an amazing relationship.

Perhaps you could build a new asset for your business that will generate value for years to come.

Perhaps something in your life is already working reasonably well, but you can see how it could be completely overhauled and transformed into something brilliant.

If you're always zoomed in, you can miss answers to success that are right under your nose. 👃

I personally work in themes that usually last around 1–2 months.

For example, I've had periods focused on improving my established business events, setting up a new website and blog, and setting up live multistreams so I can stream to YouTube, Facebook and Twitch at the same time 💪📈

These aren't necessarily things that produce an immediate financial return.

But they are like building new parts of a machine — or significantly improving an existing part — that runs my overall business and life.

Over time, those improvements compound.

Protect Your Future

I currently have four hours every Wednesday, from 10am until 2pm, protected in my calendar for this kind of work.

Without this protected time, I could very easily trade those hours for short- and medium-term financial gains.

But that would mean repeatedly choosing the immediate reward over the opportunity to build something significantly better.

It would be like checking out and settling for my current position rather than continuing to climb and move forwards.

Your future is important.

And I find that knowing you're actively building your long-term future while still taking care of the present can be incredibly grounding. It gives you a sense that you're not stuck — you're going somewhere.

Create Your Own Island 🏝️

My encouragement is to decide on some regular time that you want to protect in your calendar.

Think of it like an island of protected time that exists specifically for you to step back from the hamster wheel and look at the bigger picture.

You don't even need to know exactly what you're going to do with this time at first.

The important thing is creating the space.

With time, you can mould it into something incredibly valuable.

You might discover a new direction for your career, find a way to improve your relationships, build something you've always wanted to build, or simply realise that the life you're currently living isn't quite the life you want to be living.

Don't let every available hour be consumed by maintaining your current life.

Give yourself some time to design your future, too.

Hope you enjoyed this article! And if you're looking for coaching to transform your life, overcome social anxiety and build genuine confidence, feel free to check out my coaching page and Google reviews from some of the many people I've coached so far 🙂

Phil