From the course: Time Management Tips

Making peace with the truth of time

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Making peace with the truth of time

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- One day, I was coaching a successful business leader who had accomplished many things for her company and in her community. However, she reached out to me for help because she had started to run into a problem. She was neglecting many of her responsibilities and commitments that she had made to others. She was falling behind on projects, and occasionally neglecting important relationships in her life. I asked her to go through a process with me of listing all the obligations she had, and roughly how much time in the week it took her to do each of those things. As we reviewed the results, we both realized that she had committed far more hours in a week than the 168 she had available. It was then that I said to her, "You are "capable of accomplishing anything you put your "mind to doing, just not all at the same time." Many people, when they begin the process of learning about time management, have the belief that by getting more organized and being more productive, that they'll be able to accomplish absolutely everything that they want to do. Occasionally that does happen. But more often, people begin to realize that they are over-committed. They're expecting too much of themselves, and because they have unrealistic expectations of what they can accomplish, they end up having many switches in their attention. They rapidly jump back and forth between tasks trying to solve everything at once, which ironically gets less done. When I see this, I talk to people about the truth of time. I joke that this is why I get paid lots of money, to teach people the truth of time. Are you ready for it? Here is the truth of time. That's it. Now, seems obvious, right? Why would anyone need to hear that, let alone pay me for it? Well, the reason why people need to hear that, is because for some reason many of us believe in the back of our minds that we can cram 65 minutes of activity into a 60-minute hour. Or that we can cram 25 hours of commitments into a 24-hour day. Making peace with the truth of time is the idea that you and I need to accept the fact that we are not going to be able to accomplish everything we want to do. In fact, we should under-commit. We should try to spend 23 hours in a 24-hour day. Rather than going to war against this truth, and trying to fight it, surrender to it. Give up. Realize that there is nothing you can do to change the fact that there are a limited number of hours in your day and your week. When you do that, it will force you to make decisions about what is truly important in your day. It will force you to say no to some of your commitments, and some of the expectations that you're putting on yourself. And if you can't say no, at least say, "Not now, but later. "I will do it, just not today, because there "aren't enough hours, and there's only one me." When you make peace with the truth of time, you will likely experience a pleasant surprise, which is that you can get more done by trying to do less. Why? Because you're being realistic and reasonable, and not going into the inevitable time debt that comes with attempting to multi-task. Make peace with the truth of time, and time will become your ally.

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