How do you spend your time?
24 hours compose a day. That’s 1,440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. When broken down, it seems like an ample amount of time to complete many tasks. Often times however, we find ourselves saying “I don’t have enough time”. The question we should be asking ourselves is: What am I doing with my time?
Far too many people go about their lives wasting their time. Procrastination is a key contributor to this. We’ve all procrastinated at some point in our lives. What typically stops you from procrastinating and finally completing the task is the lack of time that is now left. It has happened to all of us, yet, at some point we must seek change!
One thing I learned early on from my father was the idea of waking up early. “Early bird gets the worm” is a common quote we hear often. Some of the most successful people wake up early and accomplish tasks before others are even awake. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kobe Bryant, and others are/were famous for their early morning regimen. They believed in waking up extremely early and working out. Kobe once said this helped train his mind. It’s easy to set an alarm at 4:00am, and it's much easier to snooze it and go right back to sleep. It takes true self-discipline to hear that alarm, shut it off, and get up immediately without having any second thoughts of laying back down. Waking up early is one of the ways to make the most of our time. Personally, I love waking up early because it allows me more hours in the day to complete other tasks. While my wife sleeps an extra hour in the morning, I train my clients. I do this because that’s one less client I have to train in the evening, and one extra hour I get to spend with her and my dog. Time really is all about making choices.
Regardless of what we do for a living, there is TIME. It really is the one thing that each of us equally have. It is also the one thing each of us use very differently. There are many people who claim they don’t have enough time to complete “x” task, yet have time to watch their favorite T.V. show. While there is nothing wrong with this, all this shows is that the task they didn’t have time to complete was not their priority. We prioritize what we feels brings us satisfaction in life. If we don’t care for it, chances are we won’t prioritize it.
“Failure to plan, is planning to fail” is another famous quote we often hear from older generations. As old as the quote may be, it remains a true statement for many things in life. If you have never planned out our day, I challenge you to try it. It doesn’t have to be planned out minute by minute, simply take the tasks that need to completed by the end of the day and give yourself a time frame in which you will complete them. There’s a strong chance you will either complete most, if not all the tasks due to the discipline of simply planning it out. If you couldn’t get to everything on your list, that’s fine. At least you made the MOST of your time. At the end of the day that’s all you can do. The goal is to maximize those 24 hours, 1,440 minutes, and 86,400 seconds to the best of your ability. This discipline is key to reaching whatever it is you deem “success”.
