🌞 Do More with Less

There is so much to do in a day. There are so many pulling demands for our time and our energy. I have been working on how to do more with less time and I have been finding some interesting patterns emerge in my own life.

The biggest impact I can have on my time is what I spend it on. The closest example to time I can draw in my life is money. When you do not budget your money, you always seem to spend everything you have, but you are often left wondering, "What did I spend it on?".

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Well time I think is similar to this. We need to be intentional with what we spend it on, because it is like a currency. What we spend our time on, will then have the biggest impact on our life as a whole.

I think about many LinkedIn posts I read about how a person picked their family up out of poverty by spending the time to learn to program each night. Took them 2 years, but now they have landed a job programming.

I cannot think about my weight lose goals. I have been trying to lose weight for like a couple years now 😅. Yet even as I write this I have accomplished very little towards that goal of loosing weight. This is because I have not made it a big enough commitment. So when I think of having less time in the day because of starting a family, running a business, leveling up your career I draw these parallels to money.

If you had a friend that was struggling to pay his bills, you would recommend they don't buy Starbucks or that they don't go to the movies, because that is not important. Time is the same.

You need to find what matters to spend your time on and then focus in on spending time in those items. What are the Starbucks and movie theatres of time in your life?

For me I found that these things were taking up time while I was at work:

• Small talk. This is something that matters to me a lot, but I also spend a lot of my breaks doing it, which sometimes stretches to longer than it should be 😉 and then I run behind

• Working on convenience vs. priority, a coworker asks me to help them with this thing for them, and I do, rather than working my priority task that has a deadline

• Say Yes!! << I do that way too much. I have had to learn to say No

So I have been working to reduce some of these time sucks in my life, in order to maximize what I can do in a day!

Everyone's time sucks will look different, but I think that it is important to map and understand where we spend our time. Because when I looked at it, Office small talk was fun, but coming home 30 minutes later was not as fun for me.

It kind of goes back to finding your "Greater Yes" which is something that I wrote about previously. We need to determine what matters more to our life.

Especially as we get busier and we get families and we get more in our life to manage and juggle.

So begin to start working with more in your life, but simply reducing what you spend your time on. It feels easy, but honestly safe guarding our time has been one of the hardest things for me. Everyone wants a piece of your time. Time to sell you something, time for you to work for them, time for you to change a diaper 😄.

You are in charge of your $$ and you should be in charge of how you spend your time. So spend it on what matters!