Posted on 03 Oct, 2008 -
17 Ways to Make Your Time EXPAND
If you opened this email then chances are that you feel you want more time in your life.
On the positive side, this could mean that you love life, like living it to the full, and would therefore like even more of it.
On the more negative side it could mean that you feel that part of you or your life is getting squashed out by other parts that take up too much time. It could also signal an issue with the pace at which you live your life. Your attitude towards time. And or perhaps just poor time allocation.
When will I EVER find the time to paint the bathroom window or learn the names of different clouds?
I know that in my own case it is all of the above - mixed up, no doubt, with a fear of death, a perfectionist streak and a desire to get everything done by Christmas.
So how can us life-hungry, achievement-hungry, time-pressed perfectionists get more out of each day?
The answers I have for us, unfortunately, will still not enable me to create order in all the cupboards, write a novel and memorise the entire history of the whole world by Christmas. They may, however, enable me to prioritize my wish list, get started on a novel and spend some very enjoyable evenings reading a book about the Reformation.
Before we proceed with my customary list of tips and ideas, therefore, there are a few questions I’d like to put to you to help you on this journey…
First of all I would like to ask you what you would like this extra time for? (If you have a pen to hand then writing out a wish list will prove useful later.)
Secondly, why do you think it is that you in particular feel that you would like more time?
What changes would it REALLY take in you or your life to actually make you feel satisfied with the amount of ‘time’ you have?
Get rid of your time-wasters and make every minute matter. 17 ways to get more out of every day…
1. What are really your priorities? If you feel there are things you would like to do but that you’re not getting time to, it’s probably the case that there are other things in your life that you are giving more priority to - whether it is ‘relaxing in the evening’, looking after the kids, earning more money or other. What are those things and are you right to give them so much priority? Is something being allocated more time than it should be?
2. Freeing up more time for the important things. One thing, for example, that can be a real eater of our spare time is rituals or routines we have got into. Freed up, however, these habits can become wonderful little pockets of time for us to use for something more joyful or ecstatic. Could your early evening glass of wine or TV fix ‘relaxation’, for example, be replaced with a half an hour video piano or Italian lesson? Could the hour you normally spend reading the newspapers be better spent on a hobby?
3. Allocating those new hours. Going back to your wish list, try allocating a reasonable slot of time to the most important wishes so that the urge gets met. Tonight, for example, instead of working, I’m going to spend an hour clearing out a cupboard that’s been on my to do list for more than a year now. I just wonder why I hadn’t done that before....
4. Make more time by noticing it passing. We are often in so much of a rush through our life that we barely notice it passing. When we make a point of watching it pass, however, we can slow it down and give our lives that meaningful quality which is often what we feel we’re missing. Could I really find a better use of the next sixty seconds, for example, than looking at a photo on my desk or watching the spider dangling outside my window. Finding the time just to BE. Relishing every moment.
5. Making changes to your routine helps slow time down. It is also those tiny daily routines such as teeth-brushing and commuting that can make us feel that our life is all blurring into one. By escaping the time-blurring rut of routine, we can make each day of our life stand out in importance and vivid colour. Change your route to work or the drink you have with your breakfast, for example.
6. Reward yourself with time treats instead of financial or material treats. I have often tried this but always cheat myself in the end. Those few weeks of time to myself I promise as a prize for over-working get stolen back when an ‘important’ new project is looming…
7. Make each day unique and special. Wake up in the morning and say, “Today, the 29th September, is a very special and unique day because...” I also like to spend at least a few minutes of each day relishing moments of the yesterday.
8. If you don’t think about the future at all - not even the next second or the next minute - then the present becomes bigger. In fact, time can almost seem to become a different dimension or entity. It may also help if you can think of yourself as eternal.
9. Alter the image you have of time. What does time look or feel like to you right now? Do you see it as similar to a railway track you have to travel along? Is it like a bag of precious sand that’s rapidly escaping out of a hole in the bottom? Or do you see it as cut up somehow into different sections? What would it be like, instead, if you were to see time as a huge three-dimensional space? As the world itself? Or even as a garden that you can wander through?
10. Perhaps you’re expecting too much from yourself? If you are the kind of person who is always saying things like “I’ve hardly achieved anything today”, or is far more aware of the list of things you haven’t done then the list that you have, then perhaps the problem is partly one of perception? Try getting into the habit, at some point in each day of making a list of all the things you have done and achieved. You’re probably already the kind of person who does more with their day than most people they know…
11. Could you actually be misunderstanding your craving? You know you desperately want more time in your life, but is it possible you could have misunderstood the reason? People who are dehydrated, for example, often mistake their body’s call for water as a call for more food.
12. Remember that you are more than what you do or achieve. There is as much value in your just being, as there is in what you do.
13. Say “no” to activities or requests that eat up your valuable time, don’t make you feel good, but yet you always seem to say “yes” to. Saying NO can be a liberating experience - making you feel more in charge of your life, proud of your principles and freed up to live better. If you find it hard then plan ahead with suitable responses you can use. One technique is to first express an interest in the proposal to make the requester feel good, but then explain that unfortunately you will be unable to do it. Another is to explain that you have a personal policy about doing this kind of thing. You could say, for example, “I’ve got a new policy of not going out during the week because I’ve just been so exhausted recently” or “I have a policy of not saying yes to jobs unless I know I can do it well.”
14. Take comfort in the fact that busy people tend to be happy people. People who are good at scheduling lots of activities into their days tend to be the happiest. To wish that days were shorter would surely be a greater curse.
15. Do less but enjoy each thing more.
16. Only do the things that matter most to you.
17. Think of time as enormous, refusing to let itself be used up.
And never forget the dying words of Elizabeth 1: “All my possessions for a moment of time”.
