Category: FAMILY

Life is short, and spending more time with family and loved ones is at the top of our lists of ‘wants’ and ‘needs’.  It’s often a top-ranked resolution each year, speaking to the human need for meaningful relationships and the understanding that cultivating such bonds take some time and effort.  It takes some coordinating to get everybody’s schedule to jive and find time slots where we’ve all got the energy and motivation to spend time with one another. Like anything that requires time and effort, quality time with the important people in our lives often falls by the wayside, and there never seems to be enough hours in the day.  We max out the limit of waking minutes within the given 24 hour window.  It is less of an issue of gaining more time, than deciding how we will make the time.  Even the time we make is not limitless.  So we have to make that time count. We can’t adjust everybody and their resources, but we have control over how much we give of ourselves for them.  Here are some things you can do to enjoy more time with the important people in your life

 

1. Decide who the important people are.

This might seem like an obvious one.  But spend some time evaluating who is most important to you in the order of their importance.  Does the time you spend with them reflect that?  Those in our households and immediate families are usually the people we see most often but don’t often get the best of us.  Don’t take for granted the important people.

Maybe we can’t help that we spend more time in person , with coworkers than with family members who live far away.  But maybe we can make adjustments that better correlate with how important they are to us.  Call more, text more often or send a thoughtful email.  If we keep up on social media, do we just like posts or do we message and converse with them?

Choose who you want to spend more time with, and don’t let people who aren’t on that list steal time from them.

 

2. Make the time (as much of it as you can).

Can we sacrifice or reallocate the time we use for other activities to spend that time with family and friends?  We make quite a bit of time to do the things we enjoy – binge watch shows, beat our own high scores, improve this, make that better…creating time to spend on something good is not a foreign concept.  While taking personal time is important, spend more of the time you use for yourself on others.  It would be nice if happy times could happen spontaneously, but scheduling time to be together and having a plan increase your chances of making it happen.

cut back time spent on:

• Television/gaming
• Social Media
• Looking at our devices/computers (reading emails, catching up on news and current events etc)
• Hobbies/leisure 
• Trying to get ahead (There is always a cap on funds and time.  Instead of only saving it up for the future, enjoy some of it now.)

If we can’t cut back on this personal time, can we include our family members in our activities?  You enjoy doing your thing, and it can stay yours, but let them in on it.  Take an interest in how they spend their personal time.  Learn more about what they do and you’ll end up learning more about them.

Of course not all extra time is spent on diversion, much of what we do each day may be to facilitate the goings on of following days.  Give some thought to cutting back on chores and errands.  Yes they need to be done, but do they need to be done right now?  Are we really saving time trying to catch up and get ahead when it comes to our to-dos, or are we too tired after all that accomplishing that we aren’t able to give our loved ones the attention they deserve?

Make enough time so that you will have the energy and motivation to:

 

2. Make the time count.

Be together.  Don’t just be near each other.  Sometimes that has value in itself, but really be together.   As an example, when watching a movie (a common family outing/date night), we aren’t really interacting – not even looking at each other.  Technically we are watching it “with” everybody else in the theater. It would be easy to just be near each other.  Be there and share the experience.

Do this with any time spent together, not just on planned outings.  Engage each other in conversation.  Washing the dishes or doing chores.  Running errands, whatever.  Share the time.  Let them know how you feel about them.  This doesn’t require a lot of talking.   A gentle touch and a warm smile.  But it will require some thoughtfulness on your part.  Use the time to laugh and listen. Gestures of affection and expressions of appreciation go a long way.   You may have to give these things some forethought.  Make a plan and try to implement it.  Things never go exactly according to plan, but being proactive about making happy memories increases your chance of making some.

 

Wanting more time with the people in your life is natural.  Carving out the time and then actual engaging with each other sometimes doesn’t come as naturally.  Recalling fond memories and imagining what we hope to be our new ones, we don’t remember the awkwardness or the work that went into making those things happen.  We remember who we were with and how we felt.   Sharing love and time is worth the effort.