Manage Your Time

Do you have a sense of time?

One hour, one day, one week, one month, one quarter, one year…

That is how you break time down into manageable time frames.

If you have a full-time occupation, if you have a family, if you have a significant other, if you have pets, if you have spiritual obligations, if you have children…

…there’s a high probability that you are overwhelmed.

And if you are overwhelmed emotionally, there’s a high probability that it will show up as procrastination.  To eliminate being overwhelmed, it’s important you understand what causes it.

Being overwhelmed causes your body goes into fight or flight.

What does that mean?

It means your body has a physiological reaction happens in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. You won’t manage your time.

Yes, there’s chaos in the world and the world will gladly volunteer to drag you into it.

So how do you wade through these waters?

You have to create order in increments of time. The concept of “time management” is a misnomer.

What’s important is that you master your emotions. You want to be able to manage yourself in frames of time. You want to live much more in the present, without being so rigid about time. You don’t want to have to always look at time.

Make time your ally, not your enemy.

The Power of Fifteen Minutes

Here’s a very simple way to change your whole perspective of time…

Break time down into fifteen-minute increments.

Begin to see what you can accomplish in fifteen minutes. Take an area of your life where there’s a lot of clutter. The clutter represents being overwhelmed.

(FYI, if you’re overwhelmed, there’s a high probability that you’re underpaid. There’s a direct correlation between being overwhelmed and under-received, or under-prosperous.)

In fifteen minutes, if you are effective, you can accomplish a lot.

Whether it’s a closet, a workbench, a desk, a refrigerator, or a cabinet, take a deep breath, get a thirty-three-gallon trash bag, and throw away everything you can in those fifteen minutes. Organize as musch as possible in those fifteen minutes.

Now… make sure you don’t do this frantically because then you’ll be overwhelmed in your overwhelm.

As you do this exercise, do your best not to let the old voice of the past interject and interrupt your present by saying…

“Oh, this is so big. What’s the use? I’ll never get it all cleaned up.”

The Power of Focus

Consider this… during a sporting event, an entire game can change in the last quarter. Teams have actually overcome twenty-point deficits and more in a single quarter of a game… fifteen minutes of measured time. Fifteen minutes is a long time when measured, evaluated, and turned into productive energy.

The next step is to manage your time in one hour. What can you accomplish in one hour?

Look at the garage. Look at what a disaster it is.

Look at your taxes.

Look at your drawer.

Look at a closet.

Look at any situation that you feel overwhelmed.

Typically, when you go into overwhelm, your shoulders hunch up and your neck sinks down into our body. You might grind your teeth. You shut down, melt down, lie down…

…quite frankly, you are down because you have no self-esteem. Being overwhelmed is a very helpless feeling, and to overcome this situation, you learn to break time down into realistic increments that measure production.

Here’s what it comes down to… If you want to achieve more, you must become more.

Your self-talk will either lead you to prosperity or lead you to poverty.

You decide.

One will reward you and one will end in regret. Which one will you choose?

The answer is obvious.

Every day, when your eyes flutter open, you are granted a new gift called time… twenty-four hours, 86,400 seconds.

How will you manage your time?

Imagine that you received $86,400 each and every single day, and you were required to use every penny of it, spend it, contribute it, give it to charity, enjoy it… but you wouldn’t get any of it back. You would probably get bored with it at some point.

BUT in reality, it would be a lot of fun to give it your best effort.

So, when it comes to time, change your perspective. Begin to value time. Borrow time from areas that don’t serve you.

Become a highly productive soul having a productive human experience!