Blog Post
It's About Time .....
- By Jessica Holt
- •
- 02 Mar, 2017
February was National Time Management Month. Why February, you ask? My guess is because by February we’ve abandoned enough of our New Year’s resolutions to have room for another one. In January, time management would pale in comparison to getting healthy, learning something new, and following our dreams. By February, we’ve settled on just being a little better overall than last year, so we can spend the time we’re no longer spending on our New Year’s resolutions thinking about how we can better spend our time.
Prioritize
The average adult spends 40 hours working and 56 hours sleeping each week. That leaves 72 hours for everything else. I don’t know about you, but when the pie chart puts it that way, I have a lot more ‘free’ time on my hands than I realized. If you can’t do all that you need to do in what amounts to three whole days out of every week, you’re trying to do too much. Decide what is most important. Decide what is necessary. What’s most important to you may not be a necessity, and your necessities may not be what you consider most important, but time fillers that don’t make either list can be the first to go, and you probably won’t even miss them.
Eliminate
My mom used to fill up her DVR like some people fill up their time. If she saw it on the guide and it looked interesting, she set it to record. She was recording everything and watching nothing, and eventually she ran out of room. Her solution was to scroll to whatever show she deemed least important and delete it in order to have room for something else to record. The DVR stayed 99% full, and occasionally if she didn’t delete what she thought was low on the list of importance, the DVR took it upon itself to delete something of higher importance. Too often we only eliminate something that fills our time so that we can fill it with something else. When our time is 99% full, we can unintentionally let the more important things slip away.
Get Started
Mark Twain said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Decide what’s a priority, either because it must be done or because it matters to you. Get rid of what’s not a priority, and don’t fill its spot. Then simply get started, and maybe by next year you’ll have the time to get healthy, learn something new, and follow your dreams all year long.
The average adult spends 40 hours working and 56 hours sleeping each week. That leaves 72 hours for everything else. I don’t know about you, but when the pie chart puts it that way, I have a lot more ‘free’ time on my hands than I realized. If you can’t do all that you need to do in what amounts to three whole days out of every week, you’re trying to do too much. Decide what is most important. Decide what is necessary. What’s most important to you may not be a necessity, and your necessities may not be what you consider most important, but time fillers that don’t make either list can be the first to go, and you probably won’t even miss them.
Eliminate
My mom used to fill up her DVR like some people fill up their time. If she saw it on the guide and it looked interesting, she set it to record. She was recording everything and watching nothing, and eventually she ran out of room. Her solution was to scroll to whatever show she deemed least important and delete it in order to have room for something else to record. The DVR stayed 99% full, and occasionally if she didn’t delete what she thought was low on the list of importance, the DVR took it upon itself to delete something of higher importance. Too often we only eliminate something that fills our time so that we can fill it with something else. When our time is 99% full, we can unintentionally let the more important things slip away.
Get Started
Mark Twain said, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Decide what’s a priority, either because it must be done or because it matters to you. Get rid of what’s not a priority, and don’t fill its spot. Then simply get started, and maybe by next year you’ll have the time to get healthy, learn something new, and follow your dreams all year long.