Fitting It All In

How are you doing with getting all the things done that you'd like (or need) to do?  If you're a business owner, do you feel you have a balance between work and personal life?  Is your business supporting your life or is your life spent serving your business?  If you can answer these questions positively, good for you!  My guess is that you are an expert at managing your time.

If you feel less in control of your time, maybe taking a step back and looking at how you use time would help.  Consider first of all those people you know who seem to get a lot done.  They manage their business, spend time with family, participate in community organizations, enjoy recreational pursuits, and even kick back and relax once in awhile!  How in the world do they do it?

Well first of all, we all get the same amount of time to spend.  No silver spoons exist when it comes to time.  So the only thing that is unique is how each of us uses time.  And I'd like to suggest that efficient use of your time comes down to essentially two things:  Discipline and Priority.

Let's think about Priority first.  There are so many distractions coming at us every day, that without some type of screening mechanism, they can rule our life, taking away the conscious actions we want to take.  It's easy to get caught up in a TV program, or a social media site, or even the latest gossip from friends.  In our business it might be email and paperwork.  But are those our priorities?  Usually, when we stop to think about what we want in our lives, these don't make the list.  Instead we typically yearn for time with family, building a stronger business and team, travel, education, even a modest amount of wealth.  It takes effort to achieve these dreams, so shouldn't these efforts be our priority?  The people we admire who have these things have the ability to spend their time where their priorities are.

Second is Discipline.  It takes a certain resolve and focus to be able to turn off the TV or step away from the computer or the gossip.  If we are in touch with our gift of free choice, we realize that we are in control of our choices and have no one to blame but ourselves for what we do with our time.  Discipline gives us the ability to be true to what we believe and to maintain our efforts in support of our dreams.  It also provides the focus to stay persistent when the work gets hard or uncomfortable and we get pulled toward the easy and the familiar (but away from our goals).

Often, time management comes down to our habits.  Habits can get us through life with ease, or they can lead us toward disaster.  For example, if you have the habit of exercise, you don't think much about it, but you become so used to the good feeling that exercise provides that you miss it when you don't exercise.  On the other hand, lack of exercise is also a habit, but one that could lead to poor health and shortened life span.  The habits in our life also take time.  So if your habits are using up your time without leading you toward your goals, as comfortable as those habits have become, you have to find the discipline to change them.  I guarantee this will be hard!  You'll screw it up from time to time.  It will be uncomfortable.  But unless you change, you'll continue to lose time to do the things you want most.