Once upon a time I kept a time wasting diary. Wow! Was that an eye-opener. I did it as a kind of experiment to decide where my time was going as I wasn’t feeling as productive as I could potentially be. I wanted to share my experience with this here because how much time do you think we all waste on a daily basis when we could be doing other things that bring us the results we want?? It’s more than we think.
At the conclusion of each day for some weeks I made a list and the times of things that I did that I concluded were a “waste of time”. Reviewing these lists I discovered some very common activities that appeared fairly regularly. To say it was an enlightening exercise on the progress of my personal development would be an understatement. Here’s a selection:
- Lying in bed for too long in the mornings;
- E-mails;
- Unexpected phone calls;
- E-Bay;
- Facebook and other social media;
- Sleeping in;
- Problem solving.
Do any of these sound familiar to you? Making and breaking habits has been proven to take anything from 90 to sometimes over 400 days to change. I know I still struggle with a few of these on occasion and I guess it’s okay – we’re all human, right?
I’ll admit that I am a high achiever and thus somewhat hard on myself. Okay, I’ll be honest, I can be a downright perfectionist at times. My partner does have to reel me in sometimes. So I say this to give you some perspective. Recently, I completely re-vamped my calendar and appointments diary changing over from my Google Calendar to two paper versions. It was a particularly lengthy, exhaustive and in some moments annoying experience, however what I discovered was that I’m much more time efficient than when I had my Google Calendar! How was this so?? I’ve managed to get more done, get it done easily and effortlessly, and the best bit is I’m actually really loving it. I’ve colour coded it so it’s pleasant to look at, it’s easy to follow according to times of the day and days of the week and weeks of the month and I feel this increasing sense of achievement when I get to the end of a day, knowing I’ve followed my calendar, have been productive and everything has received balanced attention and time. Sometimes, it’s the little things …
Going back to the title of this post “make every moment count”, I think it’s really important when you working on your goals that everything you do is time measured. If you are wanting to achieve something in 30 days, you want to be sure you are maximising every day of the month. It’s insane to think you can go on holiday for a week and achieve a 30 day goal, isn’t it? And yet many do. Jim Rohn once said that “success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day” and he was right. The thing to consider, however, is are those disciplines moving you towards your goals or moving your away from them. Only you can answer that.
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