TIME MANAGEMENT | PRODUCTIVITY
Why It Seems You Never Have Enough Time
Here are three tips for you to get more out of 24 hours.
There’s one thing most people, like you and me, complain about non-stop: the perpetual lack of time.
A friend asks whether you want to go to the movies.
“Sorry, I’m busy — I wish I had more time!”
Your parents try to convince you to build them a new patio.
“Sorry, I don’t have enough time for that.”
But here’s my question: why don’t you have enough time?
You’ll probably respond, “I don’t know, I’m too busy.”
Time is arguably the most precious resource you have in your life. Once time runs out, you’ll never be able to reclaim it or get more.
What you have is what you’re stuck with.
That means you have to use it wisely. There’s only one problem: most people aren’t very good at doing that.
The Reason You’re “Too Busy”
If one sentence could sum up all that happens in your life, then maybe it would be this:
Your mindset dictates your reality.
In other words, whatever you say, whatever you tell yourself, and whatever you believe will determine what you do and how you do it.
In this case, you keep telling yourself that “you’re always too busy”.
When you hear that repeatedly in your mind, you’ll eventually start believing in it no matter what.
“I’m too busy. I don’t have enough time.”
As a result, you’ll make it seem that you need more time than you really do, when you’re just misusing your time.
Let’s say you find yourself 15 minutes of free time.
Going along with that mindset of having “not enough time”, your thought process might be something like this:
“Read a book? No, 15 minutes isn’t enough. Clean the house? Woah, I’d need something like an hour!”
So to pass the time, you’d decide to mindlessly scroll through your phone.
A waste of time.
Although 15 minutes alone is not a lot of time, all the 15-minute scrolling sessions in a day quickly add up.
(No wonder your phone’s screen time says 6 hours.)
Because you spent your free time scrolling through the web, you’ll no longer have time for what you actually want or need to do.
How to Get More Time
Remember how I wrote that your mindset determines your reality?
Then, to use your time more wisely, you just have to change your mindset. Here are the three most valuable mindset changes you should make.
1. You don’t get time — you make it.
When you go on and on about how you “don’t have enough time”, you’re making it seem that it’s not you who’s in control of your time.
It’s like you’re suggesting that someone is giving you daily rations of free time.
“It looks like you deserved 37 minutes of free time today!”
Except that’s not the reality.
YOU are in control of your time and YOU decide what to do with it.
So when you think you don’t have the time for something like a new habit, then make time for that habit.
For example, if you want to develop a writing habit, then intentionally make time for writing. Block out an hour of your day for writing and only writing.
The same can be done for exercise, family time, reading, or whatever else.
You have to put in the effort to make time if you want to have time.
2. Squeeze out all the time you have.
Everyone understands a busy day.
The kind of busy where you’re frantically running from one place to another, where you don’t even have time to catch your breath.
However, when you finally sit down, you find that you’ve got 15 or 30 minutes to spare. What do you do?
Here’s a big hint.
Whatever you do, DO NOT procrastinate on your phone.
If you value being productive, then busy days are not for phone scrolling. Instead, take those few minutes of peace and do something more meaningful.
In particular, do something that your work and running around doesn’t allow you to do, like a hobby.
You could map out an article idea.
You could reply to an e-mail that’s been bugging you for days.
Or you could just gather yourself and relax before you start running again.
The point is that busy days keep you really busy. You have limited spare time, and when you get that time, use it intentionally.
Squeeze it out like a sponge.
3. Use Parkinson’s Law
You begin procrastinating because you think a task is too difficult for you. As a result, you assume you’d need more time than you actually do.
Instead of writing an essay in one hour, you tell yourself you’ll need as many as three.
And then you worsen the situation by telling yourself that you don’t have three hours. So you procrastinate and put the task off.
Here’s where a little something called Parkinson’s Law comes to the rescue.
Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion.
In other words, if you tell yourself that you’ll finish the essay in one hour, there’s a higher chance you will do it in an hour.
But of course, you still have to be within realistic expectations.
Parkinson’s Law works because you’ll be more motivated to reach the time goal you set for yourself.
After all, everyone likes completing their goals.
So, don’t let any tasks scare you from doing them. Never defeat yourself by saying, “Man, I’ll never finish this!”
Instead, give yourself an hour or two, and try to make as much progress as possible in that allotted time.
Chances are that the progress will save you from procrastination — you’ll probably finish the task faster than you expected.
Less procrastination equals faster completion time, which gives you more available time during the day.
