The Secret To Accomplishing More.

To stay competitive in today’s digital world you need to be able to be efficient and productive with the 24 hours that you are granted each day. The truth is we all have the same amount of time in a day: 24 hours or 1,440 minutes. Maybe this analogy will work better if we talk in dollars and cents. So let’s imagine each morning your account is credited with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Every evening the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day.

What would you do? Draw out every cent, of course right? Well, what if I told you that each of us has such a bank, its name is TIME. Every morning it credits you 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off at a lost, whatever of this you failed to invest for the greater good. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against “tomorrow”. You must live in the present on today’s deposits. Therefore, how you choose to spend your time is what will set you apart from everyone else.

TIME is a resource that needs to be understood. Click To Tweet

But it’s a different kind of resource. You can’t rent it, borrow it, store it, save it, renew it, or multiply it. All you can do is spend it. So you need to spend it wisely and not allow other people to waste it. There is no way you can “save” time. When people say they are “saving” time, they simply mean they’re spending less time on a task, or they are outsourcing or delegating it. They’re not saving it for future use because all time must be spent now. We all have the exact same amount of time. It’s the only aspect of our lives where we are all truly equal. Time to start think seriously about what you want out of life and then take some immediate action. Start tracking how you spend your time. Are you moving the needle forward or just killing time? Are you adding value to your life? Can someone else do the things that you keep putting off?

At the end of each workday, make a list of the three most important things you need to accomplish the following day. The reason I say 3 and not 15 is by limiting your focus, you are setting yourself up for success. You’re likely to accomplish the 3 that you’ve set out for yourself as opposed to starting and stopping the other 15 that you have on your plate. Every success comes at a price (time, effort, attention). You just need to be willing to pay it.

Here are some tips to help you start to manage your time better:

1. Don’t schedule every minute of the day with a task. Schedule your top 3, tackle those as deadlines move and things creep up. This will reduce tension and keep your productivity high.
2. Identify your peak times and try to schedule especially difficult work for those times. For most people, it’s the first thing in the morning.
3. Focus on that ONE thing at a time. When we try to do too much, and we end up doing far less as a result.
4. Outsource. There’s a reason that businesses and people in general work best when there’s a team involved. When you try to do it all yourself, you end up spending so much time on the things that aren’t your strengths that it really takes away from the great work you do when you play your strengths. I say this at every single event I attend or speak at: outsource, outsource, outsource.

Make a Plan: Without a plan, it’s just wishful thinking. Mr. T from the A-Team said, “A promise is nothing but a comfort to a fool”. Like taking a road trip to a destination unknown. You need a map and a plan of how you are going to arrive at your end destination. Same applies to life. Make a plan. Start now. We can help!

Last I checked scientists haven’t found a way to invent more hours, so for now, there’s Balance InStyle or a business like ours in your neck of the woods. Our team here at Balance InStyle get asked all the time “How can I clone myself?” We sigh because I hear those words all too often and our response is always the same:”You don’t want to clone yourself as much as you want to surround yourself with people who perform specific tasks better than you do”.

“It will take too much time to download to someone else to do” or “I’m the only one who can do it because…”or “I don’t have time” and the list of excuses goes on and on. Henry ford put it best: “If you think you can or you can’t, you are probably right.”

Are you putting your goals and dreams on hold because of the excuse “I don’t have time?” Remember: I don’t have time, is the grown-up version of the dog ate my homework.