Quality Time – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

How giving full attention to everything we do shapes our quality time

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Life is made up of many stages and moments, and we can look at them through the lens of opportunity so we make the most of each one. How do we make the most of every moment and truly live it? What does quality time mean? Does it call for some special kind of attention? A particular way of nurturing others and ourselves? What is quality time for?

Quality time is any moment we can give our full attention to what we’re doing, personally or professionally. It’s also the time we devote to ourselves: every moment when we can be so present and so fully engaged that we take in all kinds of information.

Daily life, and the way we’ve grown used to living, keeps us focused on many tasks at once, wasting our most valuable resource: time. I see it even in work teams at companies devoted solely to what’s urgent, forgetting what’s important and setting aside all attention to strategy to concentrate on the immediate.

Quality time comes from our values, our priorities and our strategy itself. Where there’s focus, there’s clarity, and where there’s clarity, there are priorities that deserve our full attention. An organization can hardly survive without knowing its strategic priorities, and in the same way, a person or a team can hardly reach port without knowing where they’re headed.

Even when we know our direction, our north and our path, it takes effort, discipline and determination to reach what we want. Still, one element can make it even easier to understand our surroundings and make much sounder decisions: time, and the quality of the time we invest in each moment. With a focused, concentrated mind, clear about the full presence our steps through life require, we gain a much wider stretch of road and a different perspective. That’s where the nuance of quality time lives.

What is your quality time like?

Warm regards,

Rodrigo Baccaro

• P.S. This week’s VELA (what I was Watching, Listening to, Reading and Learning):
• What I was Watching: Jony Ive on Focus. A short but very powerful video. A big lesson on how a person can live focused every second of their life and use it to create work that leaves a legacy. By the way, I greatly admire Jony Ive’s work
  – What I was Listening to: Ventajas de hablar más de un idioma (The benefits of speaking more than one language). Learning languages has long fascinated me. It’s been a challenge given how little time I have, but every year I set out to build on the ones I already speak to some degree. A great TED talk, well worth it, especially to get motivated to learn more languages
  – What I was Reading: The Art of Impossible. Having finished The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, I’m back to this wonderful book, aiming to finish it this week. I doubt I will, though, and I’d like to be realistic, especially since he’s one of my favorite authors and his research deserves to be noted in full detail
  – What I was Learning: How to Make Spanish Paella. A great contribution from my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, whom I thank for sharing the recipe they’ve been perfecting for a long time

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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