Choosing Joy
I have been learning a little about Marie Kondo, the celebrity who is helping people clean up their living spaces. On her web site, it says, "Our goal is to help more people tidy their spaces by choosing joy."
The KonMari approach is to look at each item you own and ask yourself if it sparks joy in you. If it does, you keep it. If it doesn't, you let it go.
I was thinking, could we extend this kind of thinking into looking at how we choose to spend our time?
Rather than filling up our days, isn't it better to fill up our lives?
Psychologists have worked to define what happiness is made up of. Their answer? Two things. Pleasure and purpose.
There are a lot of misconceptions around what purpose should be. (Download our "Top 5 Myths of Purpose" to read what these are.)
One of these myths is that your purpose needs to tie to how you make a living. (Not always true!) Now, if that does wind up being the case for you, awesome.
If you have a full-time gig and it has nothing to do with your purpose, your life just got more interesting, didn’t it? Before you start feeling overwhelmed, you need to know that spending as little as 30 minutes a week on your purpose will make you happier. Even with a full life, we can manage 30 minutes a week, right?
The Game of Life as Rocks, Pebbles, Sand
Have you heard the time management analogy about the rocks in a glass jar? It’s a great one. 
The two jars pictured represent the amount of time that we have in our life. They are both the same size and are filled with the same amount of stuff.
The sand represents the small stuff in our lives, those time and energy wasters that really don’t make us happy or have a lot of value. I am not going to try to list these out, but you probably know what they are.
The pebbles represent the more important things - taking care of the place we live in and our car, going to our job and/or class.
And the big rocks are the really, really meaningful things. Family, friends, our health and our purpose.
Playing Whack-a-Mole
Do you see how on the left, the sand went in first? We have a tendency to spend time on the small things first for a few different reasons.
For one, it’s easy to be reactive. Something pops up, you deal with it. Something else pops up, you deal with that. I have definitely had phases where my life felt like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. You can wind up going from thing to thing and then wondering where the heck your day went.
The other reason is because the small things don’t take a lot of effort or planning. So even though they are low value, they are also easier to do in some ways.
Next we throw the pebbles in because they have to get done, right? If you look at the jar on the left, you will see that it is already pretty much full with just the sand and pebbles in. Most of the big rocks are not even inside our jar of life.
Where does that leave us? With very little room to spend time on our purpose, connect with loved ones or take care of our health.
Filtering the Rocks from the Sand
Let's bring our KonMari filter back to mind. Before investing our time to do something, if we asked ourselves, “Does this spark joy?” what do you think the answers would be? For the “sand” activities, my assumption is that often the answer would be no. Time spent on the big rocks? I bet the answer there is often “yes, this sparks joy in me.”
You can think of the jar on the left as a reactive life. The jar on the right is a proactive life. It’s the same size jar – still only 24 hours in the day and 7 days in a week. And there is the same amount of stuff.
But by proactively putting the big rocks in first, everything fits.
Life is full and it’s easy to get distracted by competing priorities. We need to plan out how we are going to make room for our purpose in our lives.
An Invitation to Get Proactive
To start making this shift, here is an invitation. For one week, keep a time journal. (If you would like, you can use the one that I made up here.)
With as much detail as possible, take note of what you spend your time on and how much time you spend. Categorize these as “sand,” “pebbles” or “rocks.” Then ask yourself if spending time on this brings you joy.
At the end of the week, total the time up and compare how much you spent on “sand,” “pebbles” or “rocks.” Then count up the number of "yeses" that you had and what category those belonged to. You might be really surprised at the results.
Let us know what you find out. We would love to hear from you.
Here’s to you filling up your days and your life with things that bring you joy.
What’s up next? Go here to learn about where purpose lives, how to find it and how our charitable organization has been working to help girls in the foster system discover their purpose. SUBSCRIBE to stay in the loop.