As a teacher and coach I’m obsessed with time, it defines my professional life. This week on Thursday and Friday something unusual happened, we got inches of rain. Like it rained nonstop for about 12 hours between the two days. This meant that the baseball games for the entire weekend were cancelled. I went from having a weekend crammed with coaching baseball to a weekend full of found time.
For normal people this is a chance to be bored, surf on social media all day, or binge watch on Netflix. For me, this is a chance to maximize every moment of my time and spend it with family.
We were all up by 7 on Saturday even though there were no sports. My kids and I grabbed the dog and took her out to Towne Lake in McKinney. This is a lake in a suburban setting that has a path that is about a mile-and-a-quarter around the lake. Pleasant and makes people living in the suburbs feel like they are around nature. It’s also the dog’s favorite place to go.
When we got back everyone cooled off. This gave me time to do something on my to do list that’s been sitting there a while, namely change out the brake pads on my car. This is only a 30 minute job for me, but it’s hard to find that kind of time on a normal spring weekend. I think this kind of thing is important to do as I’m trying to raise children that aren’t victims and are pretty self-reliant.
My 14-year old and I went to workout, which is our quality time together. It was my leg day. As a 47-year old fart, that means lots of split squats, lunges, back raises, seated good mornings, calf raises, and then ending with squats for reps. My 14-year old is about a year into his weight training journey so he’s squatting, doing RDLs or deadlifts, doing pull-ups, bench press, and then work for shoulders and calves each workout.
Remember I said that it rained inches? That means our neighborhood storm system is full of flowing water. So we went back to the house and then all of us began making paper boats. All of my kids thought this was a bad idea until I started making them, then next thing you know we have a boat making factory complete with decorating them. Then we took them down to the storm system and floated them in the water.
After all of that my wife and I saw the new Avengers movie. I have to spend time with her too!
Sunday was about church (littlest one had First Communion), going out to eat as a family after church, and then spending time in the backyard.
This gave me a chance to work with my littlest one on his baseball skills. He’s 8 and is really promising with his skills. I’m not real high on select/travel baseball at this age – so I’m playing him up in age brackets. We’ve been working on his pitching and his hitting mechanics today.
Now, that’s an example of how I spend found time. Here’s my question for the other coaches and teachers out there, how do you use it? To me there are great uses for found time, but there are also some things that really suck the time away and could create issues for your life and relationships down the line:
- Family first: Coaches and teachers spend lots of time with their adopted families – their students, their athletes, their fellow coaches and teachers. This means that real families suffer. You have to prioritize your real family whenever you run into found time.
- Real life experiences: I read a ton of stuff each year about how devices, social media, video games, and modern movies/TV create kids that demand instant gratification, can’t concentrate, etc. But as a teacher here’s something I have figured out: kids still want all those cool experiences that adults take for granted. I can (and have) taught classes on making paper airplanes, making paper boats, making a battery out of some coins, vinegar, salt, and aluminum foil, etc. And I can tell you that my students eat this stuff up. If you have time, can spend it with your family, and can turn it into real world experiences then you are creating memories that will last long after you are gone!
- Social media is still going to be there and it still won’t impact your life any. If you have found time, put your phone down and go create some real memories. I got sucked into social media too, but over the years I’ve figured out that it doesn’t add value to life – most of the time it gets you angry, depressed, narcissistic, and takes away time that you won’t get back.
- As an adult, you can always watch TV: I don’t think your prioritizing watching something on TV (that includes sports) just because you found extra time over your family is a good use of time. Get out, have some shared experiences, and create some memories.
Now it’s Sunday night and my weekly routine starts again. I have to get ready to teach tomorrow, plus I have Annual Review/Dismissal meetings for two of my students tomorrow, which require some prep time. Sunday night is the night that I write these blogs and it’s also when I sit down and compose the week’s tweets.
I also have to plan out the week’s practices. We’re getting ready to play two teams that are weak on pitching but can score a lot of runs. Plus I have two promising pitchers that are developing and I have to figure out how to integrate them into games over the next few weeks in a way that continues their development but also keeps them confident.
Lastly, I have to plan ahead for all those baseball games that got cancelled because of rain. While I used up every minute of my found time, those games will be rescheduled and not be at convenient times…
Now that I’ve done two preachy posts in a row, I’ll get back to strength and conditioning-themed posts next week!
