The inches matter

Masonic Musings #47

Yes, it’s been a long time since my last Musings and while I can’t guarantee that extended absences are a thing of the past, I will say I’m working at getting back to writing. Which brings me to the topic of this Musings, the inches matter.

Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

One of the topics I’ve written about in the past is the 24-inch gauge and how we need to observe the use of that tool to keep balance in our lives. That’s vital to living a full life, you need to balance all the aspects of it.

However, and this is a lesson I’ve been learning all too well of late, we need to be mindful of those 24 inches, the hours in our days, it’s a finite number, and we waste so many of them.

For the last year I’ve been doing contract work (unplanned, but that’s another story) and tracking all those minutes and hours became really important. When I first started, it was easy enough to track the time I worked on each project, but at the end of the day I’d look at the numbers and go, “that’s it? I know I worked more than that!”

So I became more diligent in tracking all those little tasks, all the things that I worked on, and while the numbers have gone up I started to notice something else - all the wasted inches. I’d get up for lunch, and since there’s no one really watching, that planned 30-minute break became two hours as something else grabbed my attention. How much mind-numbing scrolling did I do on social media or on YouTube? I started to look at those numbers and realized I needed to start being more mindful, more critical of how and where I was spending my time.

It took me looking at my personal task and project management system to determine that was part of the issue (I’ve simplified it), to take the time to review what needs to be done, set proper priorities, and then schedule what needs to be done. It seems like a lot of work, but in the end, I spend an inch to gain a foot.

To be honest, I’m not sure what triggered this thought. As I mentioned, we never really think about the need to be mindful and purposeful with those 24 inches we get each day. We worry about the balance of the gauge, and that, in my opinion, will take care of itself if we pay attention to each hour of our day.