口ぐせ

My grandfather is over eighty, but he goes out to the field every morning. The family tells him he should rest at his age, but he won't listen. 'I want to work while I can' is his catchphrase.

'No time' was my catchphrase. With work and housework there was a lot to do, and I honestly believed a day wasn't enough. Once, as an experiment, I wrote down for a week how many minutes I spent on what. The result was unexpected. Time spent on work wasn't as long as I'd thought; instead, 'time spent without deciding what to do' averaged an hour and a half a day. I'd dither over what to do next, look at my phone, dither again. Over and over. So I decided to write down, the night before, just three things to do the next day. Never more than three: with too many, I'd end up dithering over where to start. After a month, the amount I get through has hardly changed. But I've stopped saying 'no time'. I understood that it wasn't time I lacked — I simply hadn't decided. Q: What was the real reason the writer felt short of time? — Much time was spent without deciding what to do next.