I am sure that you cannot remember the last time you had too much time on your hands. If you are like most people, you try to squeeze so much into your schedule every day, it is physically impossible to complete everything written into your daily planner. You mistakenly believe that you will somehow find the time to carry out the myriad of activities you schedule into your day. Nothing could be further from the truth, you will never find time for anything; each hour just seems to blend into the next throughout your day, as you lose yourself in your constant cycle of busyness. This on-going cycle, where you are trapped on a hamster wheel of constant activity, which delivers very little productivity, sees you spin your wheels faster and faster every day, but nothing meaningful ever seems to happen.
The only way to break free from this cycle of constant busyness and your perception that there is not enough time in your day, to carry out the activities that will allow you to achieve your dreams, is to accept that you will never find time in your day to carry out these actions, but you can always make time. Until you schedule time into your dairy every day to carry out the activities you know are necessary to change your life, so that you can create the future you desire, something amazing will happen, NOTHING! You will remain trapped on a treadmill of discontent, where every day just blurs into the next and nothing ever improves.
Activity Log
One of the easiest ways to make time and gain a few extra minutes or even hours in your day, is to use an activity log to measure how you spend your time over a seven day period. At the turn of each hour, spend a minute or two, exploring how you spent the last hour. Do not analyse anything at this point, only record the facts, in your activity log. This exercise should take about 2 minutes each hour.
At the end of the week, take a look at your activity log and access how much time you waste each hour, speaking on your phone, distracted by emails or Text messages on your smart phone, chatting to or shooting the breeze with people, watching TV, listening to the radio or using your time to carry out activities that are not the best use of your time. Everyone that has invested the time to carry out this exercise properly has astounded themselves, with how much time they waste each hour on unnecessary activities.
After the week has passed and you have identified all the areas where you are wasting time. Make a list of these and strive to avoid wasting any time during your day on them, from that moment on. Create a new habit of sitting for a few seconds at the end of each hour, throughout your day and ask yourself this simple question: “Was the last hour the best use of my time”? Becoming more effective and efficient is not an event, it is a process. Practice this new success habit, of evaluating your time usage every hour and within a very short time, you will stop investing your most valuable possession, namely your time into wasteful activities.
Meet your Future Today
After mastering your time, as described above, by striving to only allocate your time to high priority activities, throughout your day, you can then introduce an additional concept to help you achieve your goals. I have called this concept “Meeting your future”. This is a really simple strategy, where you sit once a week (I find Sunday evening best) and schedule time into your dairy each day to carry out the really important tasks necessary to achieve your dreams. This is effectively time you schedule to carry out the prioritised activities, which over time will help you to unlock the future you really want.
Yes these are meetings with yourself, but as they are the most important meetings every day, (what could be more important than your happiness and dreams) nothing must be allowed to disturb you during these meetings. Your phone must be off; your door must be locked and you must give 100 % attention to this activity.
Since I have learnt new productive time habits, where I aspire to only invest my time into high priority activities and have introduced the concept of “Meeting my Future” into my life, I have accelerated my growth and am living a fulfilling and meaningful life. I want the same for you, give these simple concepts a try, they will completely change your life.
Author: Andrew Horton Time Management Training
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