Like I said in the video, one of the things I hear the most in my coaching practice is, “I just don’t have TIME.”
And of course, I immediately say with a confident smile, “Yes, you do. And we’re gonna find it.”
Now in the video, we talked about The Power Hour principle. Some of you can’t even imagine having one whole free hour on your calendar.
Time is an elusive quarry. It knows how to hide in places you would never look and can disguise itself as busyness. You can also think you have it and then suddenly it seems to have disappeared.
WARNING: When you DO find time, you’re undoubtedly gonna be tempted to fill it up with something else you feel obligated to do, don’t necessarily WANT to do, are not called to or simply just something that’s not life giving. As you get better at finding time in your days, recognize it as the precious commodity that it is, guard it jealously and spend it wisely.
Here are some common hiding places of time:
- Social media. I know this doesn’t come as a surprise. We know we spend too much time poking around Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. The other night, I set my alarm on my phone and plugged it in before I went to sleep so it could charge overnight. The next morning, my alarm sounded, I reached over to turn it off. The phone was already in my hands and without even thinking about it, I hopped on Facebook, just to see what was going on. Thirty minutes went by. You read that right. THIRTY MINUTES that I didn’t even notice. I’m sure that happens all the time when I realized what had happened, it was a serious wake up call (pun intended).
There are actually apps and websites now that you can program to track the amount of time you spend on social media throughout the day. Probably sounds like something you don’t want to know, but if you’re serious about looking for time, look no farther than your phone screen or your laptop. If you’re curious about how much time you actually spend on social media, check out this app that might help you keep track of where your days, hours and minutes are going.
- Waiting rooms. Don’t you love how you can’t be more than 10 minutes late to an appointment without being charged and made to reschedule by your doctor’s office, but your doctor can leave you waiting as long as they want? If you have an aging parent who requires a lot of medical care or kids with braces, you could spend a significant amount of time in waiting rooms.
And what do you do with that time? Look at social media on your phone. Watch Family Feud on the TV on the wall. Read one of the ratty magazines on the rack.
OR you could be doing something productive: either something pleasurable, like finishing that book you’ve been dying to read, or something just necessary to open up sometime someplace else. I often take my laptop to the orthodontist office, put in earbuds to play white noise to drown out anything else, and read, work, or write.
- Netflix/TV. I may be the only person I know who doesn’t have Netflix. And it’s a good thing I don’t because binge watching is something I could get totally lost in. There’s nothing wrong with a little wind-down time during your day. But if you regularly spend evenings and weekend days watching entire seasons of a particular show, you may have a problem. (The word ‘binge’ is accurate. It’s an addiction, just like alcohol or drugs.)
So what’s the answer here? Use some self control. Decide in advance how many episodes you want to watch in one sitting and HOLD YOURSELF TO IT. That would never work in my case so I’m trying to hold off on getting Netflix at all. If you’re serious about making time for a hobby or a dream or to be with people you love, Netflix might have to get the boot.
Nutrition tracking is something you do when you’re trying to get healthy. You write down everything you eat and look for patterns or weaknesses that you can work on overcoming. Time tracking is no different. Download and print out this PDF to track a week or two of your life, just to see where your time goes. There are also multiple time-tracking apps for your phone on iTunes. See what works for you.
We may not be able to find entire HOURS at first, but you can find 10 minutes here, 30 minutes there, 20 minutes there and with those small, valuable chunks we can make some tweaks and make more time for the things and people you love.
