At work, one of the peers has this annoying habit of forwarding emails that I have already received – and these emails are more of the provocative nature (focusing solely on issues or highlighting where things are not working). I used to respond to these emails. But, as things got hectic, I did not have the patience to do that, so I decided to delete such emails. Funnily, enough one of my team members mentioned the same thing, ‘Why does she/he keep sending emails? And it gets my mind racing.” I told her – “Ignore the emails – just delete it – it’s not the best use of your time.”

There was another time when I was worried about something at work, and one of my peers nonchalantly made a statement, ‘It’s not worth putting energy into.”

How many times in our lives do we spend an obscenely vast chunks of time spending emotional/mental (and sometimes even physical) energy on something tiny? It’s not worth it.

I cannot recall which book I was reading, but one of the statements in the book was, “You are a tiny speck in the universe, and nobody gives a shit about you.” All the things that we do to make ourselves feel important – at some level, they are meaningless.

How do we first identify that it’s not worth spending our energy on? One of the critical indicators could be – ‘Are you dealing with an exception or a regular occurrence?’ If it is an exception and happens once every five years – not worth it. And if it does happen – then yeah, find a way to deal with it and move on. The thing about life that people forget is ‘Moving On’ refers to your thoughts and mental state as well – Keep Moving.

Another question could be, ‘What kind of an impact will this have in my life?’ Do you keep thinking about traffic, or do you think about your future partner? If it has no impact on your life – there is your answer. It seems ridiculously simple, but I find myself surprised at the inordinate amount of time I spend thinking about something that does not even occur in my life.

Ok, so now you can identify which questions are worth it and which are not? Now, how do you get your mind to move in the same direction? Training our minds is where most of us struggle. Most of the time, we are so unconscious that we do not even know what we are thinking. We are all puppets of our minds – Somebody says something to us, and off we go on a roundtrip around the world. We rarely ask ourselves – is my mind focusing on what I want it to think? Meditation is one way to train the mind – watch your thoughts, become aware of them and awareness will automatically bring it to your attention – when you can make a conscious choice about whether it’s worth it or not and move on.

What things are you spending time on which are not worth it?