Stay motivated with TimeRichMe blog - Page 2

Do you have a clear idea about what the things you need and want to do are, or do you find yourself stressed out that you might have forgotten something? Do you know how long the things you are currently taking on will take? Do you have an overview of what’s stuck and what’s working?  Do you have a big picture of what your current obligations and commitments are, including the ones to yourself?

Do you know all those 80 / 20 rules about how 80% of results come from 20% of work? They miss out something essential! 

Saying yes to people when we don't want to is in some ways like being a shopaholic. Being a shopaholic adds a lot of money debt to our account, for the pleasure of having beautiful things right now. Saying yes to people when we don’t want to adds lots of time debt to our account. If you are good with money management in fact, and averse to credit card debt, I want you to imagine, every time you are considering saying yes to something you might regret later, the sound of a till swiping your credit card.

We tell ourselves that we don't have enough time to do all sorts of things that we would love to do. We sometimes do projects in a hurry and we feel bad about it, because there's not enough time to do them properly. When we are time-poor, we feel anxious and stressed out. It feels like there is not enough time to truly engage with our activities and the people around us. We sometimes end up believing that having a clear mental state and deploying our best efforts or full self on something are luxuries we don’t afford.

When we forgo the things that we like for too long, and pressure or stress mounts up at work or in relationships, it is much easier to overreact or to feel like our life is somehow being taken away from us by all these other activities. All we need sometimes to feel peaceful and content is a nod towards our own identity, authenticity, and unique pleasures. This requires time for ourselves.

Many people move their nose in disgust when the subject of breaks is mentioned (I know, because I used to be one of those people). They see themselves as a furnace of continuous activity, which doesn't need any breaks, because, don't you know, they are very energetic. The same people generally can end up taking many secret breaks throughout the day. And by secret breaks what I mean is not that they are hiding their breaks from their co-workers - I mean they are hiding their breaks from themselves.

Time richness is not only about hitting your goals, but also about how you generally feel when inhabiting your time: whether you feel stressed out, or unprepared, or you feel there is enough time for you to get ready for things and launch into them from a place of clarity of mind and energy. Unfortunately, though many of us enjoy feeling prepared for things, we often sabotage that good feeling by cramming in one extra activity, or staying on an activity for too long, to manage to get more done, before going for that next meeting, activity, or the leisure time for which we would like to feel prepared and in an appropriate mood. Time itself won't ring a bell in our head to tell us we should stop what we are doing and prepare for the next activity. And we won't get extra time to prepare for the next activity just because we wish for it.

Most of our time is spent in routines. We make our morning coffee and maybe look through our email in the morning. We take our lunch break, then meet with a certain colleague to eat together on a bench in the park if the weather is nice on Thursdays. We light our candles and pour ourselves a glass of wine before getting into the bathtub. Or we settle down with a good book in bed for about an hour before our sleep time.

You may have heard it before: our brains are not made for lots of interruptions, and we shouldn’t be multitasking. This is because, when we multitask, we only get a boost, a feeling of doing more, when we keep on switching tasks. But the reality is that this constant switching between contexts costs the energy of our minds and, without realizing, we actually are much less productive when we switch than when we stay on one activity for a longer period of time.