“. . . in the last few minutes, has your mind wandered off into some area that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re reading here? Probably. And most likely where your mind went was to some open loop, some incomplete situation that you have some investment in. All that situation did was rear up out of the RAM part of your brain and yell at you, internally. And what did you do about it? Unless you wrote it down and put it in a trusted ‘bucket’ that you know you’ll review appropriately sometime soon, more than likely you worried about it. Not the most effective behavior: no progress was made, and tension was increased.”
Okay, first, the editor in me wants to rewrite that paragraph for clarity, especially the second sentence, but this isn’t about me being an editor—it’s about the thought that popped into my head after I read this paragraph.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that money and time are valuable commodities. I never thought about energy being a commodity though. I guess I always knew it was, but I never thought it about it on a conscious level. Now that I have, I totally agree with Allen—I get tense and irritable when my mind gets overloaded with what it perceives as having so many tasks to complete that some of them are slipping through the cracks of my poor memory. Ultimately, I spend energy—a real commodity—in ways I wouldn’t need to spend it if I just found a system that kept track of what I need to do and then actually followed through and did it.
That led me to this conclusion: If money, time, and energy are all commodities that have limited resources, then I need to make sure I’m spending all three wisely. And conversely, whenever possible and appropriate, I need to either save or replenish those commodities so I’ll have more in reserve when I need it.
