Hello everyone!
For those of you who don't remember, here's a recap what I covered last time when I put forward the idea that your busyness is simply a lack of organisation to your priorities, which can result in far more egregious consequences than you might think.
This time I want to help you out by suggesting a few ideas that might help you put said priorities in order so let's get started...
Busyness - Simply a Lack of Preparation
The quickest way that you can get an idea where your time is going is to get a hold of a diary for yourself, or failing that a journal or notepad will do. In this book you are going to document for a week where exactly your time is going, right down to the minute.
Yes, it's very banal and boring at first but if you'll trust me when I tell you that, in the long run, it will show you where your "busyness" can be changed into "organised" as quick as a flash.
Block Out Your Vitals
For your "vitals" I'm saying the appointments or periods of time that cannot change no matter what, which is the category where your work is most likely to fall into. Build anything else around that, for instance if you have appointments with a medical professional, work it into your diary (that's why I suggested it first because most day-to-a-page ones have times printed in them.
These are the ones that, barring a life or death emergency, cannot be shifted or re-arranged no matter what. The rest will be built around these.
Check Your Downtime
It will be quite tempting to, once you start, forget to add some items to your day that you've undertaken and if you forget enough you are liable to want to give up altogether. You have to push through this period, you just have to because this is the point where you can identify the times you are not doing anything in particular.
I'm talking now about logging everything, your mealtimes, the times when your TV is off and you are reading a book (though maybe don't log your bathroom breaks, lol), EVERYTHING!
Re-evaluate Your Direction
The longer that you do this, the more you will start to see where most of your time is being spent or invested. Now, if it's work, that's hardly surprising and, in fact, is to be expected seeing as most people tend to be preoccupied with work a lot of their day.
It is when the bleed-over starts to happen and by that I mean the point where you find yourself pushing back other activities that are equally important but are getting neglected. This will happen every now and then, but if it starts to happen more and more often, you might begin to find that you are failing to allocate sufficient time for each activities.
Of course, things like overtime at work cannot be always anticipated, but it is in the instance where you simply didn't leave yourself enough time to complete what you needed to that is where the changes need to come into effect.
At the end of the day, look back over your diary and see just where your time went, it doesn't even have to be more than 10-20 seconds. The more days that you do this, especially if you do like I do and colour code your entries, the more you will be able to see where most of your time is going. It will be at this point that you have to start looking longer term and thinking about if where you are going is being contributed to, or being hindered by, what you are doing today.
Final Thought
Take me, in 2018, I want to get back into recording my music again only this time, I want to focus more away from religious music and get back into secular music as I would love to one day be a lounge singer in a top quality hotel spinning the hits from the likes of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Mario Lanza etc
It doesn't matter if people think I'm dreaming because of being out of work right now, but that's how dreams are realised; by having them in the first place! :-P
I hope this has helped you to see that your time is not slipping away from you and only feels that way because you might just not be accounting for it properly today. But that can all change tomorrow if you will just start to hold yourself fully accountable for the time that you are given.
I hope this offers some of you some ideas going into 2018 for where you can make changes that will better benefit you and those around you because we only get one go around at this thing called life, so better to have embraced it having done all we wanted to than dreamed a lot and done nothing about it!
Peace... and duct-tape!
===TLP===
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