Take back control and do what you love

We all talk about time, how it is our most precious resource. That it’s more important than money. Once it’s gone, we can never get it back. We ask ourselves where it goes, or marvel that it has just flown by.

It’s pretty normal to get stuck in a rut where you really don’t like most of the things you do on a daily basis. That’s a pretty sh*t way to spend your life.

But we don’t do anything about it. We just go back to the grind because we’re too busy. We complain to our family or our friends. We turn on the TV. We look at our phones. We do anything to distract us from finding more time. It’s a vicious cycle.

“Busy is a decision. You decide what you want to do and the things that are important to you. And you don’t find the time to do things — you make the time to do things. And if you aren’t doing them because you’re ‘too busy,’ it’s likely not as much of a priority as what you’re actually doing.” – Debbie Millman

I’m not telling you to stop watching TV. It’s up to you what you enjoy doing. But I can guarantee that there are a bunch of things that you don’t enjoy doing that you can cut out of your life.

We all let layers and layers of distractions and interruptions that take away our whole day. Email is the best example. Nobody in their right mind would say that going through email is what they love to do. Yet we spend hundreds, thousands of hours a year typing out replies and deleting emails. Not worth it.

There are lots of tips on how to take your time back each day, more than I can fit here. But the most important thing is making time to make time.

Carve out a little bit of your day, every day. First thing in the morning works best, before your day gets hijacked by distraction. Write down your thoughts and reflect on what chews up your time. Reflect on what habits you are building (or slipping back into). What changes can you make to your day to get more time back?

Taking the time to do this feels a bit funny at first, but after a few days (or weeks) you’ll find it a lot faster to get your thoughts together. And just as importantly, how do you stop the newly found free time from being filled up again?

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”  – Annie Dillard

Take back control and do what you love.