Out of Time?
We all are. It's a limited resource, right? Well, yes and no, and time management is yet another one of those things we were never taught in school that seems just oh so important to adulting.
Time is how you use it. If you try to do all the things, guess what? There won't be enough of it. But even a person on vacation starts to miss their mundane job or chores at home after a while. (No, you don't? Teach me!)
We were taught growing up to just keep "making room" for more. We start in school and that seems hard enough, but then we add extra curriculars. OK. We get used to that, and then we add a social life. OK. We get used to that and we add our first job. And then it's around this time that we actually start to see the costs of adding more to our world. When I add my job, I lose time with friends, and that sucks!
The problem is that we envision that everyone else just "squeezes" it right in! Take parenthood for example or your first full-time job, or college or anything else, really. Your life has just dramatically shifted and changed. But we ALL (yes, all) still try to hold on to who we were previously or how we used to live previously.
My clients say it all the time. I just gotta find the time/space for (the gym, date night, more work, more, more, more) in my life. My question ALWAYS is, what are you giving up?
Time is a limited resource. So if you add an hour workout into your schedule, you're not going to magically discover a 25th hour in the day. You are displacing an hour of something else. For most of us (especially women), it's sleep or our personal pursuits. And when it's a big priority for us (like kiddos) we gladly say goodbye to those friends nights out, or whatever. But over time, it comes back to us.
So how do the people doing it correctly make it work? They don't. Or they get a TON of help! Think about it. Ask your friends who seem to have it all. Do their parents help? Do they work part-time? Do they have a housekeeper? Do they sleep 5-6 hours a night? What do they sacrifice to have all of that? They are as limited by time as you, me, Beyoncé and Oprah are!
It's about priorities (you had to know that dirty word would pop up). You only have so much space in a day. So what do you put in it? Does it make you happy? Like Marie Kondo, our schedules aren't this impossible thing to keep organized, they are just overcrowded!! What can you cut. What can you say no to? What can go, to make room for the stuff you love?
Magically, when our schedule and time is spent on the things we love and enjoy we don't stress so much about how it's flying by. (OK, maybe there's still a little stress left, but its less.)
