MR ELF: 5 ways to spend time well

Replace swiping / liking / scrolling with one of these

Would you please forward this email to two people you think might benefit from using their time more intentionally? You might utilise the ‘F’ in today’s post to initiate the conversation.

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You find yourself with some time on your hands. A meeting gets cancelled. You decide against the cinema. A flight is delayed. The internet goes down. Or you’re looking at the day ahead, timeboxing, and wondering how best to fill it.

The mnemonic, MR ELF, can help you to use that time well, which feels good in the planning, the doing, as well as the thereafter. 

I’ve written a post about each of these five positive activities, extolling their virtues including their simplicity. Links are below. My hope is that you’ll now be better able and more inclined to engage in one or several of them rather than defaulting to easier, less wholesome, less intentional behaviours like social media. (It occurs to me that a die with one of these activities on five of its faces and a question mark on the sixth should exist…and will!)

• Meditate. A wonderful activity to rest and know our overworked mind. Notice the striking link between mindfulness and timeboxing.

• Read. Almost everyone would like to read more. It takes just a few minutes to read a few pages. A whole chapter can usually be read in 15 minutes. What’s blocking you is not real.

• Exercise. If, like me, you don’t enjoy it but agree it should happen, put it in the calendar and enjoy a 91% likelihood that it happens. Remember that a little exercise is much much better than none.

• Learn. We humans are (or can remain) curious throughout our lives — a neotenic trait. We can influence and enhance our development and experience of life by proactively choosing cool stuff to learn, learning it, and applying it.  

• Friends. We won’t see some of the people who are dearest to us many more times in our whole lives (the arithmetic is sobering) unless we make those encounters happen.

All of these require more effort than the flick of a finger across a screen. But none of them ask for all that much. A good first step — for me and many, the best first step — is to put the intended activity into your calendar. To timebox.