Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of I Heart Radio.

Good morning.

This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast Podcast.

Today's tip is to choose the bigger life.

When we think about how we want to spend our time,

keeping this phrase in mind opens up possibilities.

In a recent before breakfast episode, I talked about figuring out how many hours were in a life. If you plan to live to be 90 or so, that means life has about

800,000 hours. Some chunk has come and gone, depending on your age, but that isn't meant to be morbid. I think looking

rationally at our portfolio of ours can help us see time as both precious and plentiful.

Part of being rational about time

means recognizing that all time involves tradeoffs.

Here's a phrase to remember.

Expectations are infinite. Time is finite. We are always choosing. Choose well.

So when figuring out how to allocate the hours we have left, how can we choose well?

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, has written that her insight for time decisions

is choose the bigger life. I think this is a good one for a few reasons.

First it takes us outside how we happen to feel at any given moment. In life it's often easier not to do things.

If we only listen to how we felt in the present, we might spend our entire lives sitting

on the couch watching television.

The things we would like to say we have done are not always the easiest things to do at any

given moment.

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