Jan 26 2016

I often hear people say “I don’t have the time” or “I’ll get to that later when I have time”. H. Jackson Brown Jr. said ““Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”

While we live in a very different world than those people, the spirit of the quote remains. It is never about having enough time; it is about setting priorities. Most of us can set at least some of our priorities from day to day. Some can even set their priorities regarding everything they do.

Just as important as which priorities you set, is the consistency & will power to stick to those priorities. Sure, there are events that happen that distract us, things that become higher priorities in the short term and sometimes in the long term. But our priorities are still where we should be focusing, consistently.

Covey’s Time Management Matrix  (apparently originating from Eisenhower) simplifies the things we spend our time on into 4 categories in a 2 by 2 matrix – one axis is urgent/not urgent, the other is important, not important – and sure, there are degrees within those but how often do we not have time for something purely because we have prioritised something less urgent or less important?

I’m no master at time management and I don’t always get my priorities right, but I do know that similar to what I wrote last week, failing to focus on the correct priorities is often an excuse. Often it is because the things that I prioritise are the things I prefer doing rather than the things I should be doing.

We often focus on doing things right – maybe we should focus more on doing the right things. We might find ourselves in a position where we no longer “don’t have the time”.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/85608594@N00/22197765482″>Robin Sharma Stop managing your time. Start managing your focus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>