Stop Trying to Find Time

“I want to read more often, but just haven’t found the time for it yet.”

“I’ve been mean­ing to knock out that home project, but just haven’t found the time for it yet.”

“We’ve talked about going on a vaca­tion, but just haven’t found the time for it yet.”

Have you ever said any of these? Or some­thing sim­i­lar? Have you ever thought about some­thing you want to do and lazi­ly decid­ed you would do it if you could ​“find the time?”

I have. I do.

But this is a type of lie we tell ourselves.

Time is easy to find. It’s now. It’s tomor­row. It’s next week. It’s easy to find the time. It’s not hid­ing from you.

What’s more dif­fi­cult is inten­tion­al­ly decid­ing how to spend the time.

Think about your time as a bank account. It’s yours to spend. And guess what! It expires and can’t be saved up. So you bet­ter spend it on stuff you actu­al­ly want to spend it on. Bud­get your time like you bud­get your mon­ey. (Assum­ing you bud­get your mon­ey, that is.)

It seems many of us think about our time as some­thing we don’t have an influ­ence on. But that’s back­wards. Most things that we do, we choose to do. We choose to use our time in var­i­ous ways. Work­ing. Talk­ing. Read­ing. Watch­ing. Exer­cis­ing. Etc. We’re choos­ing to spend our time on these things.

No Time

Have you ever gone even fur­ther than the ​“find­ing time” men­tal­i­ty? This is where you sim­ply say you ​“don’t have time” for something.

Anoth­er lie.

Here’s a fun chal­lenge. I wish I could remem­ber where I heard it first. Try to shift the men­tal­i­ty of ​“I don’t have time” into ​“that’s not a pri­or­i­ty for me.” Let’s see a few examples:

“I want to read more often, but I don’t have time” becomes ​“I want to read more often, but it’s not a priority.”

How about this one:

“We’ve talked about going on a vaca­tion, but it’s not a priority.”

Ouch. That can be painful. It def­i­nite­ly helps put some of these things in perspective.

So I have two chal­lenges for you today. First, think of a few things you’ve found your­self say­ing you haven’t ​“found time for” and decide if you should inten­tion­al­ly spend time on them. Sec­ond, swap out the ​“I don’t have time” phrase for ​“That’s not a pri­or­i­ty” and see if you have some changes to make.