When shopping at Costco a book titled The World Book of Happiness complied by Leo Bormans (Firefly Books, 2010) caught my eye because of its simplistic but stunning front cover and the interesting short articles from one hundred professors of happiness from all over the world. I love anything to do with being organized and how we organize our time is definitely an important part of organizing. It is in this book I came across a very interesting article exploring people’s relationship with time and how it impacts their happiness and wellbeing. Who doesn’t want to have the luxury of spending our time in a manner that gives us a high degree of happiness?

The author of the article is Dr. Ilona Boniwell who is a professor from the University of East London in the United Kingdom. Her key statement was that research shows “satisfaction with our time is one of the most important predictors of our overall wellbeing.”

The question then is how do we become satisfied with our time? When you really think about it, we can’t really manage or in other words manipulate time even though the term ‘time management’ is used so often. Boniwell states that it is the choices we make with the time we all have that creates the happiness factor.

Everyone has the same bank account of time but it is the choices we make about how we use our time that is most important. However, making good choices does not mean that we have to fill up every second with more choices for getting even more done.

Boniwell provides three key ideas for how to be happy with how you use your time:

1. Give yourself the gift of making sure you make time for yourself everyday. I guess there is something to be said for having that ‘me time’ in order to be happy. I certainly crave it and can feel quite frustrated and tired if I haven’t built in that time just to do things that I like to do.
2. Plan to complete something every day. It doesn’t have to be a significant undertaking in order for it to be considered completing something. It can even be a smaller task that is a chunk of the bigger task that you may be working on. I guess all of these feelings of accomplishments lead to greater feelings of satisfaction that naturally leads to feelings of happiness.
3. Don’t spend time blaming others or other factors for your feelings of discontent. Rather, take full responsibility for your own time. When you think about it, blaming things like getting too many emails, people you have to work with, interruptions as wasting your time are actually all things that can be controlled by the attitudes and choices that your make how you respond and deal with them.

A couple of years ago I was touring London with one of my daughters and took this photograph of the famous Big Ben Clock Tower. Interestingly, after a bit of research it is now known as the Elizabeth Tower after Queen Elizabeth’s recent Diamond Jubilee. This beautiful tower has four clock faces that are the largest in the world. The hour hand is 9 feet (2.7 m) long and the minute hand is 14 feet (4.3 m) long. Big Ben is the nickname for the largest bell in the clock tower. It weighs 13.7 tonnes and is 7.2 feet (2.2 m) tall and has a diameter of 9 feet (2.7 m) It along with four other smaller bells produce the chiming sound every hour with a high degree of accuracy. Londoners and visitors to London have a constant reminder that an old chunk of time that has passed and whole new chunk of time is to come!

I thought the Big Ben Clock Tower was a great symbol of how actually time can be a good thing by being our friend as long as we use it wisely with balanced choices creating feelings of happiness and well-being rather than view it as our enemy that controls us creating the opposite feelings of stress and discontentment.

How do you use your time? Is it your friend or is it your enemy?

Thea (pronounced Taya) is the blogger behind the blog ‘Time With Thea’! She works full time as a classroom teacher and in her spare time enjoys decorating, DIY projects, cooking, crafting, photography, gardening and most of all organizing. She loves blogging about how to simplify, organize and beautify your life. A lot of what she has learned has been self-taught and through trial and error trying to balance her personal and professional life.

You can follow Thea on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram via @TimeWithThea.

{Are you interested in being a guest blogger for Project Done?}