Coaching practices for Who You Spend Time with
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Who You Spend Time with, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- Seeing the people I care about keeps landing at the very bottom of my list
- Some people leave me lit up and others leave me flat and small, but I keep giving the most of my time to the draining ones out of habit or obligation
- I come away from most of what I scroll through and most of the people I’m around feeling smaller and more agitated, and I can tell it’s quietly dragging my whole standard down
- I spend on whatever everyone around me seems to spend on, and at the end of it I couldn’t tell you what actually made me happy
- My partner and I have drifted into totally separate social lives
Practices that may help
- Prioritize social time as a primary time investment
Time with people you care about is one of the strongest predictors of feeling your time is well used.
Time Affluence Practices (Cassie Holmes) - Curate your social situation portfolio
Who you spend time with, and in what contexts, is perhaps the highest-leverage situation selection available to most people.
Situation Selection, Made Practical - Choose whose mind you spend time in
Spend time with the best minds — living or dead — and guard against the rest pulling you down.
Seneca on Time, Made Practical - Define your Rich Life before designing your spending
Decide what genuinely brings you joy or meaning before allocating a single dollar.
Conscious Spending Plan, Made Practical - Invest in shared social networks
Spend time with people who affirm and are connected to both of you as a couple.
Relationship Maintenance Behaviors - Apply 80/20 to relationships and energy sources
Identify which relationships energize and catalyze your best work, and invest in them disproportionately.
The Pareto Principle: 80/20 for Personal Productivity - Invest in experiences rather than possessions
Experiential spending produces more lasting happiness than material spending of equivalent cost.
Time Affluence Practices (Cassie Holmes) - Spend time on activities that feel both meaningful and enjoyable
Activities that are both meaningful and enjoyable produce the highest time happiness — aim for the overlap.
Time Affluence Practices (Cassie Holmes) - Investing in people over status
Direct discretionary time and energy toward relationships, not just career and acquisition.
The Good Life: Lessons from the Harvard Study - Start the week by connecting your schedule to what you value
Time feels well spent when you can articulate why it aligns with what matters to you.
Time Affluence Practices (Cassie Holmes)
Related concerns
- Who To Spend Time With Life Phase
Some relationships that sustained you in a past season may be misaligned with your current one — and vice versa.
Review whether your key relationships are season-appropriate
- Who You Spend Time With Wellbeing
Time with people you care about is one of the strongest predictors of feeling your time is well used.
Prioritize social time as a primary time investment
- Discretionary Time Happiness
Buying back time only raises happiness if the freed time goes to high-return activities.
Invest freed time in activities with documented well-being returns
- How To Feel Time Well Spent
Activities that are both meaningful and enjoyable produce the highest time happiness — aim for the overlap.
Spend time on activities that feel both meaningful and enjoyable
- How To Spend Time On What Matters
Time feels well spent when you can articulate why it aligns with what matters to you.
Start the week by connecting your schedule to what you value
- The Good Life Lessons From The Harvard Study On A Budget
The Harvard Study of Adult Development — the longest longitudinal study of adult life, directed today by Robert Waldinger — found that the strongest predictor of long-term health and happiness is the quality of our relationships, not wealth or fame. It is real, decades-long research, but it is observational: it shows relationships and wellbeing move together, which is strong but not proof of pure cause.
Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.