How often do you find yourself complaining about not having enough time? There are just not enough hours in the day to do everything you need to do!
Many of us find ourselves constantly chasing time and wishing we had a bit more of it. We feel rushed and flustered while battling to meet deadlines and arrive at meetings on time. However, your days don’t have to be this way.
Not having enough time is rarely the problem, it’s how you’re managing it. Indeed, perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate how you’re using your precious hours because ultimately, you’re getting 24 of them a day and that’s not going to change.
How do we think about time?
We often think of ourselves as using time. Are we using our time in the best way? However, we don’t use time at all, we do things through time. In this respect time management isn’t really a thing – we can’t manage time, we can only account for it.
What do we really need to manage?
Business Strategist, Charlie Gilkey highlights that “People who think they have time management problems really have priority management problems, which means, at root, they have self-management problems…[T]here are only so many priorities that a given group of people can address in a given slice of time. One of the chief jobs of the leaders is to ensure that people are addressing the most important priorities in any given slice of time.”
What’s the root of the problem?
Ultimately, we seem to be spending a lot of our time focusing on the amount of time we have. Instead, we should be deciding what to do with our time and working out what our priorities are.
Accept the fact that you may not get everything done. But feel confident that you are going to complete your most important tasks. Once you can do this, you won’t need to be worrying about time anymore.
Some questions to ask yourself
Take a few minutes now to ask yourself these important questions:
- What are you focusing your energy on?
- Where should your energy be focused?
- Are you starting with important tasks or urgent tasks?
- Are you wasting your energy on anything?
- Are you trying to do too much at once?
It may be helpful to discuss some of these points with your manager to see what they would like you to focus on.
Once you’ve set your priorities you’ll find you have plenty of time to complete your tasks and achieve your goals. Wouldn’t that be nice?