Ron Ashkenas on how trivial decisions will impact your happiness:

… most of us don’t consider in advance how much effort, energy, and time we are willing to invest in a particular position — and what balance we want to achieve between professional and personal success. As a result, like the physicians in my study, we make dozens of small, subtle and almost invisible choices about how to spend our time. Do we stay late at the office to finish a memo, or put it off to the next day so that we can have dinner with the family? Do we allow ourselves to be distracted on vacation by constantly checking email, or do we put work aside and enjoy the time away? Do we give up a weekend to handle a crisis, or do we proceed with our previous plans?</p>

With all of these questions, there is no right answer and either choice can be justified. But if the majority of these decisions over time go one way or the other, they may create a pattern that was not consciously chosen — but just “sort of happened.”

Like small, invested sums of money that grow to a large balance over time, the little choices you make on a daily basis also accrete with powerful force.

How are you temporally micro financing your goals? Which ones are getting the most funding of your time? Most importantly, what goals are you borrowing time from?