Everybody in The Moballise Physiotherapy Clinic has the same problem. A statement you will very rarely hear from a physiotherapist. And yet, there it is. The problem is that we all have just 24 hours in each day!
As a physiotherapist, I spend my time with patients reassuring them that I will never ask them to commit unnecessary time towards their recovery.
As a ‘normal’ person, I strongly resent spending my time on anything that fails to benefit me and my loved ones. I break my day into three thirds – sleep, work and fun. All of these are currently necessary in my day, although I do my best to tweak them.
I simply HAVE to have a minimum of eight hours’ sleep per day. Without it, I struggle to function. I can, however, happily accrue this total in sections. Some nights I will be wide awake at 5am and others I will be dragged from a brilliant dream by the alarm. I adore my siestas and will happily take a twenty-minute power nap throughout the day. I do generally sleep for a third of my day, though, so that is eight hours gone without much choice or desire for adaptation.
Most of us work for an average of eight hours per day. With a forty-hour week being an unhappy average, there is very little we can do about it. I do my best to make everything I do work-wise efficient and effective. I stopped being a busy fool many years ago. Nowadays, if there is no foreseeable future benefit in a task, it never attracts my attention. Brutal, I know, although I think I can justify it in the next paragraph!
Fun. This is the best part of my day. If we take away eight hours of sleep and eight hours of work then we are left with eight hours of fun.
Fantastic!! We do, however, have to fit all of our non-work, waking tasks into this time. I am a generally lazy person – I prefer to have nothing to do in my fun time. This is the reason I am so brutally efficient. As I have covered before, time IS the most gift I have. I spend it VERY carefully. Much more carefully than money. If I can save time anywhere then I will.
I focus my time on saving up my time each day to spend on my fun portion of my life. With my loved ones – my family and close friends. You will never find me doing pointless exercises in my fun time. I presently run about 20 kilometres per day. To work and back. I very rarely go to the gym. I do lift weights, although I do this in my garage with my two testosterone-fuelled teenage sons.
You will certainly never find me doing ‘physio exercises’ in my fun time. I spend a great deal of my work time figuring out how to keep my ageing body mobile without it impacting on my fun time. It could be as simple as crossing my legs to ‘open up’ my hips or keeping one of my legs out straight under my desk to prevent my hamstrings from fore-shortening.
I then pass this information onto my patients so that THEY can save time and do fun things in their fun time!
