What Do You Want And How To Prioritise It.

Your Time, Your Way

Is there a gulf between what you want and where you are? That’s what we are looking at today.

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Script | 341

Hello, and welcome to episode 341 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

Many time management and pro ductivity problems result from a disconnect between one’s goals and what one is prepared to sacrifice to achieve them.

If you want to spend more time with your family yet are not prepared to say no to working beyond your regular working hours, there is a disconnect.

If you want to lose twenty pounds yet are not willing to cut back on sugary treats and exercise a little, there is a disconnect.

And, if you want to be more productive yet are unwilling to protect time on your calendar for doing the work you want to productively do, there is a disconnect.

It is sad to watch people desperately scramble for any excuse for not doing the things they say they want to do. It’s easy to find excuses, but much harder to be honest with yourself and accept that whatever you say is important to you is not important at all.

As the saying goes, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”.

Worthwhile goals take time. Often, you will need to learn new skills, gain experience and build endurance. There will be setbacks and sacrifices to be made. And, of course, time to be found.

That’s all part of what makes achieving goals exciting. If it were easy to achieve your goals, you would feel empty and unfulfilled and likely not bother trying to improve yourself.

It’s an interesting topic, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Suzie. Suzie asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to find the time to do everything I want to do. I’ve done your Perfect Week exercise but never seem to be able to fit everything into my week. My Perfect week looks great; my real week is a mess. Is there anything else I can do to fit more into my week?

Hi Suzie,

Thank you for your question.

This is something I come across a lot in my coaching programme. An ambitious person discovers there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they want to do.

Often, it’s someone who works a full-time job from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, who wants to exercise for an hour every day and start their own side business in the evening.

Now, all of that is possible, but it won’t be if you also want to spend time with your family, go out every weekend with your friends and watch episodes of your favourite TV show each evening.

As David Allen says, you can do anything you want, but you cannot do everything.

One of the first things you can do is to begin with the basics. How much time do you need to sleep and eat? Typically, people require between six and eight hours of sleep each day.

If you sacrifice sleeping time, what’s going to happen? You’ll first become tired and easily distracted; if you continue not getting enough sleep, you will become sick. How will that help you do the things you want to do?

So, get the basics right first. For any human to operate at their optimum level, they need the right amount of sleep, healthy food and some exercise each day.

Lack of sleep, poor-quality food, and sitting around all day will destroy your energy levels, mess with your emotions, and result in you not getting very much done. Get those three things right first.

The next step is to look at your calendar. Where can you protect time for doing what is most important to you? This will depend on what it is you want to do.

For instance, if you want to start building your own business, you may only be able to do this in the evenings after work. Perhaps, if you are more of a morning person, the only time available might be early in the morning.

Author John Grisham used to write his books before going to work in the morning. He’d wake up at 4:30 and write for two hours before getting ready for work.

However, it comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice to pursue your goals. If waking up at 4:30 AM is not something you are willing to do to work on your business dream, that’s fine. Nobody will judge you. That’s simply a choice you have made.

There’s very little I would wake up at 4:30 AM for.

This isn’t just about our dreams and goals. Perhaps you want to be a great parent—who doesn’t? What does being a great parent look like?

Maybe you decide to have a family meal every evening at 7:00 pm, where you talk with your kids about their day and what they learned is important. Doing this is not impossible.

Yet, if you also value your career and rarely make it home before 7:00 PM, what are you elevating above being a great parent?

These are hard truths we are often afraid to address. Yet, if you want to live the life you want, you need to face them. What is more important, your relationship with your children or your career?

Again, there’s no judgment here, and the choices you make are entirely yours to make. But some choices need to be made to have that feeling of fulfilment.

The work vs family dilemma has always been fascinating to me.

Often, when you look deeply at it, it’s not really about the work itself; it’s the fear of being unpopular at work. Saying no to colleagues asking for help with their work so you can finish a project you’re working on risks being unpopular.

We worry about what our colleagues will think of us if we refuse to help them with their work. So we say yes to helping them, which means we need more time to finish our work.

And because time is fixed, that means the extra time we need to finish our work must come from the time we would ordinarily spend with our family. And after all, our family will understand, won’t they? Won’t they?

Another one is the importance of taking care of your health today to live an active and healthy retirement. When we’re in our thirties and forties, most people don’t worry about this at all. We prioritise our careers and social life above our long-term health.

Yet, if you were to visit a doctor and they told you that if you don’t change your diet and get some exercise, you will be dead in six months, the chances are you will make significant changes. Suddenly, your career and social life become less important than your health.

If you were to think about it for a few minutes, getting a little exercise and being more mindful about your diet is not difficult. It’s a choice you can make today.

All of this is why spending some time looking at your areas of focus and deciding what is important to you as a person is critical. Without knowing what is important to you, you will drift from one thing to the next.

This means defining what family and relationships mean to you. How does that fit with your career goals, finances, lifestyle, life experiences, and purpose?

These are important questions, and if you were to spend time defining what they mean to you, knowing where to spend your time will naturally follow.

What are you willing to sacrifice to live life on your terms?

Is the risk of upsetting your boss by not responding to her text message immediately worth it to spend undisturbed time with your family? Or is serving your customer professionally worth risking being late to a meeting with your colleagues and becoming unpopular?

When you know what your areas of focus mean to you, these choices are easy to make. You, in effect, make the decisions before they need to be made.

The upside to this is you gain respect. Not just respect for you and your values but also for your time.

The real danger is wanting more than you are willing to sacrifice for.

Building a business takes a lot of time and effort - are you willing to sacrifice time with your friends and family to build that business?

To stay organized and on top of your work, you have to say no to many people. Are you willing to say no to new things to keep up with the work you are paid to do?

To spend more time with your family, you need to reduce your work time. Is that a sacrifice you are willing to make?

Being more productive is never about doing more. It’s about knowing what is important to you and spending the appropriate time needed there. It means you must be comfortable saying no and not worrying about being unpopular or occasionally upsetting people.

After all, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time. You can only please some of the people some of the time.”

So, Suzie, before you go back to your “perfect week” calendar, spend some time with your areas of focus and prioritise what is important to you right now. Define what each of those areas means to you.

Once you have done that, return to your perfect week calendar and ensure you have enough time for the things you most value in your life.

I promise you that if you do that, you will feel more fulfilled, more focused, and much more productive.

I hope that has helped. Thank you so much for sending in your question and thank you to you too for listening.

It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.