I’ve found an interesting dynamic amongst my social circles these days. Here’s the short of it:

If you do not fill your own time in the day with stuff that you truly want to do, people will often push their own agenda onto your precious time. 

It’s interesting because when you’re legitimately busy, it pushes doing non-essential time-wasting activities further down the priority list. After all, with 24 hours in the day, and a third of it lost to sleeping, you’d better be very deliberate about what you do with the other 16 hours.

If 8 of those hours are spent earning a living, then you must be very careful about that last 8 hours you’ve got left at the end of the day. Do you dedicate it to family? Going out and meeting friends? Eating? Drinking? Sports? Dating? Working on your super cool idea? Hobbies? Whatever it is, that last sliver of the day is what so many of us fail to recognize as the most important, scarce hours of life.

At my undergrad graduation ceremony at CalPoly, I clearly remember the speaker stressing the importance of living in the margins of life. At that time, I had very little clue about what he was talking about. Hell, I was 23 and ready to go crazy (which I did)! What did I know about priorities, commitment, responsibility at that age? I was just some dumb kid, and these were things in my mind to worry about far later down the line.

And now that it’s far later down the line, I’ve gotten to truly appreciate what that speaker said about these margins. I’ve discovered that the older we get, the more we must be  careful with our time and what we fill it with. I’ve found that otherwise, people will request their use of your time, and suddenly you find yourself 6 hours later wondering what the hell happened.

Now, I’m not advocating shutting yourself out and becoming a hermit – quite the opposite. I’m advocating a smart use of your time, and to stay busy with the things that matter, lest you be sucked into doing something you really don’t want to do. One thing I personally enjoy filling that time up with is building long, strong, quality relationships. You can’t shortcut that. One can find plenty of drinking buddies at the bar, or go to affinity groups and meet people with like minds, but real, true friendships and relationships – well that truly requires time.  This is something I find that married couples have a very tough time doing, and with completely good reason – family is all that truly matters. But one aspiration I have someday when I raise a family of my own, is to never neglect those key relationships I’ve spent years growing. I see it happen too often, but hey, that’s the norm, right? Family does come first, but if you’ve managed the margins of your time wisely, you make time for the other right things in life.

I had a friend recently who said he was bored. I almost slapped some sense into him. To be bored in this great country of privilege and opportunity, to be bored when you are truly amongst the top tier of wealth relative to the world, to be bored when you have so many options before you – well, you can sense my angst and disgust. I REALLY don’t understand this state of ennui that people so often find themselves in. There is SO much to do, SO much to experience, enjoy, and just LIVE – that when someone says they’re bored, I almost take offense. Maybe I have a natural inclination to detest entitlement, pride, greed, and now boredom. It’s like, really?! Are you simply lazy or unmotivated, or lack any sense of discipline and drive to accomplish goals in life?

When someone says they’re bored to me, it tells me that they’ve given up, be it in small or big ways. Life is too short to be bored.

So when you have time, be careful not to let yourself get bored. Because when you experience boredom and you have time, guess what, people will steal that time away from you and commandeer it for their benefit.