If you’re a fan of personal development (read: making your life better than it was yesterday), then you’ve probably already seen the core question of this activity.

“What should I be doing with my time?”

Almost all personal development or self-help advice is an attempted answer to that question.

Funny how such a simple question can create the biggest segment of content, books, and youtube videos. Potential answers to that question, or pieces of that question, have made people extremely rich.

But, if you want a practical answer to the question, you must make it personal.

There is a big difference between “What should I do with my time?” and “What should people do with their time?”

To answer that question, you have to ask yourself 2 additional questions.

1. Why do I want out of my life?
2. What will happen if I continue my habits over the next 10 years?

What you want from your life is important because no wind is favorable if you don’t know where you are going. Without clear preferences, you have zero ability to decide whether to do one thing or another.

The second is about compounding habits. Every action has a consequence. But the consequences of most of our actions and behaviors are small. We clean our room. It’s a tiny accomplishment. The benefit of one-room cleaning is tiny.

At most, it will help your mind be marginally clearer.

But. That small benefit every single day? It adds up. It’s like investing a dollar every day. It takes a long time for that to mean anything. Then, long after you’ve forgotten why you’re investing a dollar a day, it means a lot.

Every day you take part in these tiny actions. Some are intentional. You set out to do them. Most are not.

Any easy way to monitor whether or not your daily habits, in other words, how you organize your time, is helping you accomplish your vision for your life is to ask yourself this question: What will happen if I continue this habit for the next 10 years?

Do this for each habit you recognize in yourself.

While having a drink at dinner after work is not a good but a perfectly acceptable habit when looked at on an individual basis, looked at over the course of 10 years, does it have a net positive or a net negative effect on your life?

If the answer is net negative - it will not bring you closer to the life you set out to have - then work on getting rid of the habit.

If the answer is positive, optimize your day to invite more of that into it.

Keep in mind every virtue in extreme can turn into a vice. That said if your answer to whether or not a habit is good or bad is something like, “this is ok in moderation,” you’re likely just making an excuse, so you don’t have to get rid of a habit that has a net negative affect over the long term.