Your values aren't (necessarily) what you say they are
TL/DR:
How you spend your time is a truer reflection of your values than anything you say with words.
Time is about tradeoffs. Every yes is a no to something else, whether you notice it or not.
Doing a quick values check before you default to "I've got work to do" gives you a real choice instead of an autopilot one.
Making up the lost time by working later isn't the fix. Rest is a value too. Move the work instead.
Buffer in your plan is what makes all of this possible. When you plan for the real world and build slack into your deadlines, you'll say yes to what matters without falling behind or feeling guilty.
The Whole Shebang:
Sometimes, when my 17 year old comes home from school, he’ll come down to where I’m working and sit down behind me. And we’ll have a little convo, just for a few minutes, before he goes back upstairs to do homework (or play League of Legends or whatever else teenage boys are up). You see, I have a big (red!) comfy chair behind my desk. It doesn’t quite fit the space, but I love the chair and I didn’t know where else to put it. But putting it there was serendipitous.
Case in point: a several weeks ago, around 4:15pm on a Wednesday, I heard the front door open and shut, and I yelled a quick “hey, how was school?” up the stairs. And instead of a reply, I heard 2 voices: my son, and his girlfriend.
I figured that today wouldn’t be one of the days where I would get the ephemeral joy of that 5 minute convo with my son.
So imagine my surprise when both of them came downstairs, both of them sat in that chair, and both of them started chatting with me? (If you’re a parent of a teen, you’ll how how precious these moments are, because you know how few more of them you’re going to get. But I was trying to keep my cool. Don’t want to scare those teens away, you know?)
In any case, this chat was going for a record; by 4:30 or so there where no signs of it ending. And there were 2 thoughts going through my head (er, who am I kidding, there were like 50 thoughts going though my head, as there are at any given moment, because I have ADHD, but there were 2 dominant thoughts):
“OMG, I have so much work left to get done today”
“But, also, I’ve got 2 teens who seems to want to talk to me.”
And it would have been so, so easy, to turn back around and say, “ok kiddos, nice chat, but I’ve got work to do”. But, instead I did a quick values-check with myself and decided against that thought.
I didn’t know where this was going, or how long I was going to get them for, but I know that I value time with family, with my kiddos, more than whatever work I “had” to get done.
And so I leaned into the chat.
And an hour an a half later, we were all still chatting, while crowding around my phone looking at baby pics and videos of my son when he was little, because his girlfriend asked to see them. And that’s a request I’m always willing to indulge.
(A soccer player herself, I was delighted to show her a family favorite, the one where my son, at approximately 2 years old, in his super cute “SoccerTots” uniform (because, yes, we enrolled our 2 year old in soccer because weekends with small children are so much more bearable with activities outside the house), places 2 soccer balls on the ground in front of him and tries to kick them both at the same time, one with each foot, and then promptly falls on his cute little butt, with a very surprised look on his face because, well, physics.)
And well, let’s just say, that was one of the most enjoyable 90 minutes of my week. It hit all the joy buttons: social time, family time, nostalgia and teenagers actually wanting to spend time with me! (IYKYK)
But this wasn’t the decision that I would have always made. It wasn’t an “easy” decision.
In fact, that “quick values check” was probably going on in my head for 5 minutes. Because, as I said, I had work to do. And time is about tradeoffs.
The decisions that we make with our time are the truer reflection of our values than what we state with words.
In fact, when my youngest son was in elementary school, I had a little wake-up call, in the form of a cute assignment my kiddo brought home.
On a single page, in his first-grader’s cursive, was “All About Mom”. He’d drawn a portrait of me, and answered questions about me. And while I mostly agreed with his assessment, one answer stood out. I had beef with that one. What was it?
“What’s your mom’s favorite thing to do?”
And do you know what my 6 year old said??
“Working”. I swear to you, he said “working” was my favorite thing to do.
Now, no shade to you if your favorite thing to do is work, but, while I absolutely love my work, I can think about about 100 things I’d rather be doing than working at any given moment.
Just to name a few:
Throwing pots at the pottery studio
Crocheting
Reading
Pulling weeds while listening to an audiobook
Cooking
Hanging out with my family (ugh, is it bad that this was literally the 6th thing I wrote down, when I’m writing an essay about how I value family time over work?? Uh oh…)
And so, I had a good long look with myself in the metaphorical mirror and I thought, “hmm, why does he think that??”.
And my conclusion was a couple of things:
I work from home and
When he gets home from school, I’m always working and
Little kids go to bed early, so most of what he sees me do during the weekdays is work (because I never have and never will work weekends).
And so, I decided to do a couple of things after that.
First, to talk to my kids about all the things I do actually enjoy doing (in addition to work) and second, to make sure that, when my kids get home from school, I make uninterrupted time for them, even if it’s just a few minutes.
And if you’re looking at that (short) list of behavior changes and thinking: “That’s it??”, well you and me both.
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit how little my behavior changed after that “wake up call”.
What did it take for me to put my time where my mouth is in a real-deal way?
Being faced with my own mortality.
It was only after I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022 that I made a decision to always choose connection when presented with the choice between “work” and “people I love”.
And so, I chose to spend 90 minutes shooting the shit and watching cute videos with my son and his girlfriend, instead of finish the work I’d planned to do that day.
And I stand by that choice.
And you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t work longer that day to make up for it. Because I value rest too. So, I’m not going to work after dinner.
Instead, I shifted my plan. I moved the work I was planning to do that afternoon to sometime later in the week.
And I was able to do that, without consequence, because when I plan, I plan for the real world, I include buffer in my plan. When I agree to deadlines, I build in time to account for the unexpected.
Sometimes, it’s in the form of things that take longer than I’d estimated (because humans, including me, are generally pretty bad at time estimation). Sometimes, it’s in the form of new urgent work that showed up (because we all have some amount of “things I didn’t know about yesterday, that have to be done today”, every day) and sometimes, it’s in the joyful, and fleeting, distraction of a teenager wanting to spend time with his mama.
And that’s the choice I want to be able to make, every single time, without guilt!
If you were to be real honest with yourself, is there an area of your life (or many) where your time and your values are misaligned?
And what decisions would you need to make to align them?
And if you need help aligning your time with your values, here are 4 ways we can work together:
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