“ Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are.”- Eric Butterworth
You don’t have a time management problem.
You probably think you do, but the reality is that everyone has the same amount of time. In fact, and you may want to take a deep breath here: you have plenty of time.
What you may have is a “mindset” problem.
Try this experiment before you read on: take 30 seconds to search around the space you are in and count everything you see that is blue.
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Note what your new focus did to your capacity to see blue things.
Blue was amplified wasn’t it?
How many red things did you notice?
My guess is that red was completely tuned out of your awareness.
That’s exactly how we create our mindset around time and everything else.
As a result, the severity of your “time management” problem will correspond to the degree to which the story (read: mindset) of “there isn’t enough time…” is running your life.
How about trying this one instead:
“There is enough time to do what truly needs to get done today.”
Make an experiment out of it. Conduct some science and test the hypothesis in your own experience. Play this new game sincerely for a week or two and see what happens. Start each morning with a new story. Change it from the “I have so much to do today and so little time”-story to the “There is enough time”-story.
In fact, there is only one thing for me to do right now and that is the thing that I’m engaged with in this moment. This sentence. This article. My next coaching session or my next email does not exist right now. Focus is the opposite of swamped.
Focus on all the time that you have, and how it’s enough to get done what truly needs doing. Focus all your attention on right here and right now. Gradually your time management problem will disappear like a figment of your imagination (because it literally is). Just like telling yourself that you are swamped is another use of your imagination. Using that word and believing the thoughts that support this story creates the feeling of being swamped.
But that doesn’t mean that, in reality, you are swamped.
An autopsy of a swamped person won’t find any “swamped” in the body.
In You Don’t Have a Time Management Problem – Part 3, we’ll look at how “time management problems” are caused by people pleasing.
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