
How many TIMES have you said or you know of someone who has said, “I wish I had more time,” “How do you find the time,” “There just isn’t enough time in the day.” We become so involved with writing our first book, starting a new job, or trying to impress our boss in hopes of getting a promotion that we forget about taking time for our families and ourselves!
If you can’t find the time during the day to take just five minutes to yourself or 30 minutes to have lunch with your partner, then you don’t have a time problem, you have a time management problem. Don’t beat yourself up, many of us have this problem and I would like to give you some ideas on how to find time. Before I get into that, I would like to give you some things to think about. Did you know that the average person spends about 26 years sleeping in their life which equates to 9,490 days or 227,760 hours? This study was based on the average person sleeping between six to eight hours a night. When I was younger, I would go to bed late and rise four hours later ready to take on the day. Today, I need eight hours or I just don’t function well. My focus is off, my energy is low and my temperament is not as friendly.
Here is another study. The average person Surprisingly, spends 7 years trying to get to sleep. That's 33 years or 12,045 days spent in bed!
How many hours do you sleep at night on average?
Now let’s talk about how to manage your time so you can spend more of it with your family and yourself.
Time management is like anything else. You need to have a plan or you will find yourself running and then asking at the end of the day, “Where did the time go?”
Many people when planning their week, meals or travel plans do so on the weekend. So with this in mind, let’s take a Sunday morning or evening and spend no more than 30 minutes planning out the week.
1) Understand that you own your time!
I get it, many of us have bosses and deadlines at work. children that need to be taken to karate class, school plays and help with homework, S.O.’s (significant other) who want some time with you before going to bed. In the end, you own our time. So how do we own our time when deadlines, children and S.O’s are taking it from us?
2) Calendar - On Sunday take your calendar and block out your week.
Monday morning - get up at 5 am ( for 30 minutes of just me and my coffee).
6:30 am - leave for work ( if you know there is heavy traffic, add that to your travel time.
7 am - if you know you're going to have meetings, put them in your calendar.
Do this for yourself each day and pay attention to how close your time management is to the reality of the day.
3) Review your week - Did you arrive on time to work, if not, why (left later than planned, traffic was heavy). Did your meeting finish early and you had 10 minutes before the next meeting, what did you do with that time (used it to prepare for the next meeting, read your emails, talked with a colleague about their weekend). Whatever the reason, write it down.
See if you are finding gaps in your day where you could have called your S.O to say, “I love you,” or make the doctor's appointment that you asked your partner to do for you.
I think you’re getting the idea here.
4) Restructuring your time - Now that you’ve had a week or two seeing how your days go.
Restructure your time for the next week, use the calendar to map out your day from morning to bedtime. Book time in your calendar for children time and S.O time and stick to it.
One of the reasons time gets away from us and we can’t seem to get to the family or the deadline at work, is that we don’t stick to the plan. I understand that minute by minute planning can sometimes have hiccups. It is our job to decide if those hiccups are worth giving up time you have planned somewhere else.
Remember this, you have no more or less time than anyone else. We all get 24 hours in a day, how we plan or don’t plan those hours is on us.
Start with this and let me know if you are finding time that you once thought wasn’t there.
I look forward to hearing from you.
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