When you are caught up in the whirlwind that is corporate life, it can be difficult to find time for just about anything. If you’re not careful, long periods of existence can go by without you feeling like you actually accomplished anything of importance to you. As carefully as you may try to manage your time, there are just to many urgent and/or important things to do every day. Beyond this, the even bigger hurdle to actually working on what you think you want to work on is that feeling of sheer exhaustion, of the complete absence of motivation and energy, that you have after a long day, week or month of stick handling it all.
How is it possible, then, to find time for everything you really believe is important to you? Here are some thoughts.
1. Be patient with yourself. Beating yourself up about the fact that it’s been over a month since your last blog post, or since you last picked up that transformative book you bought, or since you last chopped an onion in the kitchen can be a barrier in itself to getting back to these things. Remind yourself that you can’t change the past, and that it takes time to establish new habits, or break old ones.
2. Evaluate priorities. Frustratingly, there may be a difference between what you think you want to pursue and what you actually want to pursue. Sometimes, the idea of something is too overwhelming to resist, but when you actually start doing it, it just isn’t for you. For example, you may really believe that you want to make time to learn to cook, but every time you could actually spend some time in the kitchen, you just can’t bring yourself to do it. Sure, there may be other reasons for this, but it is also worth evaluating whether cooking is really something you want to do in the first place, or whether you just liked the idea, conceptually.
3. Eliminate excuses. There are many time wasters just waiting to suck up your time; tune your time management system to the point where they are no longer a factor. Otherwise, there will just be too much inertia to overcome to actually sit down and do something new or initially uncomfortable. For example, if your desk is always a mess and your email inbox is seriously out of control, it will be very difficult to sit down, clear your head, and write a coherent blog post. A super-efficient time management system keeps these distractions out of the picture in the long term.
4. Just start. While it is true that starting is easy and finishing is hard, you can also use this to your advantage. Yes, finishing is important, but unless you start, you will never even have the opportunity to finish. Sometimes, you just need to get going, even if you have to force yourself to do so, and worry about the middle and end later. Or not–you may find that after starting, this isn’t something you want to finish after all. In the end, it’s better to know that, rather than to keep trying to find the time for it.
For me, one of the things I have been struggling to find time to do is write here. Between corporate life, family life, and ramping up the time I spend on physical activity, posting here has fallen below the line of what gets done in a typical day. But every day I didn’t write an article here, I thought about how I would have liked to, and how I would have enjoyed sharing some thoughts. Finally, I just started, and I am glad I did. Time to turn it into a habit.
