A quick run of the math looks something like this. We spend eight hours a day on average as an American at work; we spend an additional 45 minutes commuting to work each direction and at times, we spend portions of our weekend at work. There’s overtime, emergencies, and other events that force us to complete work on off-hours. So it looks something like this: we spend at least one-third of our life at work. Additionally, if you want to have a healthy sleep pattern, we spend one-third of our life sleeping. Put another way, we spent half of our week hours in our professional field.
This area of our life, regardless of whether we are entrepreneurs, solopreneurship or employees is an area of our life which cannot be neglected when it comes to designing where we want to be in the future. Because we spend so much time in this arena, it’s important to make sure we are moving forward and not standing still. It becomes extremely easy day after day to go through the routine and not be accomplishing the goals we have set out to achieve. Of course, we need to start with setting the goals and expectations we desire to achieve.
What do you want to be? Where do you want to be? What do you want to accomplish? Where do you want to end up? It’s questions like these we need to answer and then lean into week after week, day after day, hour after hour as we live our professional life. Do you want to wake up tomorrow 40 years old and hate the work you do? If not, we need to plan for the future and implement the plan. If you don’t, the future will simply put you in its plan.
Our personal, spiritual, and relational portions of life may be closer to our heart, but our professional life takes up a bigger portion of our time.
