Some Simple Steps to Getting More Time
TIME…do you have enough? Of course not! None of us do. But in reality, we all have the same 24 hours in a day. Why do some highly successful people seemingly have plenty of time? Why can’t you ever seem to find the time? Achieving your goals comes down to how you use those 24 hours to best move you forward.
Time can either work for you, or against you…you choose!
This is the first in what will likely be a long series about time management, and effective ways to make your time work for you, instead of against you.
The very first step on the path to time freedom is awareness. Awareness of how much time you actually spend doing something useful and how much of it is wasted. High achievers obviously don’t have more time, they just use that time more efficiently. How many times have we all heard the phrase: “Work Smarter Not Harder”? I’m not actually a big fan of it as a blanket statement (for reasons outside of the context here), but when it comes to how you use your time, I think it’s a very applicable. You don’t actually need more time, you just have to be smarter about how you use your time.
Here’s an example from a day I had this week:
I had to get an MRI done. The facility was about 30 minutes away, and the test itself takes about a half-hour. In the past (until about a year ago), my time in the car would have been spent listening either to sports radio (I’m in the Philly area, which is the inventor and king of sports talk radio, and I’m a sports fan, so…) or music.
- Step 1: I replaced the drive time entertainment in both directions with listening to an audio book (today was “Think and Grow Rich“, you can find it here).
- Step 2: I used the time inside the MRI machine as my daily gratitude and affirmations, plus my goals and objectives visualization. The added benefit of this for me personally is that I’m NOT so good with the MRI machine, so the concerted effort to focus on these practices helped keep my brain from feeding the fear.
Just those 2 simple changes gave me 90 minutes of MOVING FORWARD time.
You can do the same thing, gradually over time, and eventually you’ll be finding new and innovative ways to make better use of your time. Start today by picking just one small part of your day that is typically filled with entertainment or something mindless, and replace whatever that was with something that MOVES YOU FORWARD (and by the way, listening or watching or reading the news DOES NOT COUNT as something that moves you forward…a discussion for another day). If its a car ride, find a podcast or an audiobook that has real content. If it’s some other time, find a book or a website that is teaching you something that you need to know to get better at whatever it is that you are trying to achieve.
Get started today! Please reach out and connect with me, via any of the methods found on the About Me page. I look forward to learning from you!
