About eight years ago, I used to have a really heavy schedule wich left me with little disposable time. While I didn't really make a lot of money, I had my needs covered so I tolerated being broke. I hadn't had my bout with cancer, so I took my health for granted. But time... time was a bitch. It was the one thing I didn't have, and I complained about it. A lot. To anyone that would listen. But I never took any steps to change that, because there was a secondary pay-off to being time-less.
It was a "GET-OUT-OF-THIS" FREE card. Whenever I faced something I didn't want to do, I would just claim I didn't have enough time. That way, no one gets offended. More importantly, when I faced something I couldn't do, I would blame it on time. Under that reason / pretext / excuse, I could mask laziness, selfishness, incompetence, non-committance, irresponsibility, and lack of financial wherewithal.
When my comfort-zone had deteriorated to point of intolerance, and I decided it was time to make a change, I had to stop laying the blame on lack of time. Eventually, learning to place structure and systems around time management, provided me with the perspective (and the time) to instill other changes in my life that have taken me to where I am now. But I can confidently say, it all starts with learning how to manage your time.
Or more appropriately, your energy.
In "The Power of Full Engagement" Tony Schwartz (and Jim Loehr) go really deep into how managing your energy efficiently, is the key to making more time.
You see, it is impossible to make more time, as time does not exist. Time is just an illusion. It is a artificial construct to describe the interval between states. Time cannot be made or lost. Time can only experienced.
What happens to most of us, is we believe that we have no control over time. For instance, most of us usually do not have control over our work schedules. Or commute time. Particularly, he have no control over the way others spend their time as it relates to us. Don't you hate, for instance, when you go pick someone up, having given them AMPLE time to get ready, yet, somehow, they never are?
Well, while we can't make more time, we can certainly alter the way we experience time, by managing our energies and building structures in our lives that promote a better experience of time. After all, time is simply the resource we use to get results, and results are the measure of our performance.
The reason we run out of time, is because we are too tired to do things when we DO have time. Things then accumulate. We become overwhelmed. Our minds, when enveloped by a period of overwhelm, release depression inducing hormones that actually make the body tired. When our conscious mind senses exhaustion, an internal battle ensues between our subconscious mind (shaming us into doing things), and our conscious mind (saying the body can't). It becomes a negative, self-feeding, self-perpetuating spiral that keeps us in that negative state indefinitely.
The way to snap out of this spiral is to first, identify the sources of the overwhelm, then break the cycle.
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