Everybody gets 168 hours each week. Why it is some people can accomplish so much, while others achieve so little? The answer begins with a question. What are we doing with our time? Spending our 168 hours productively working, looking after our families, spending time with friends, and pursuing various hobbies and interests is about finding balance. If we feel we never have enough time to make it through each week, it may be the right time to do an inventory of the things we spend our 168 hours doing. One of the tragic things about lost hours is that they are irreplaceable. Once they are gone, they are gone forever, along with all the opportunities life would have afforded us.
Here are a few tips we might find useful as we seek to maximize our time and strive for abundant living:
Log your time.–it is important to have a way of tracking how we are spending our time. When we do this, it is easier to change or enhance the areas we are falling short. When we do a time log, we go over it and add up the hours. We should examine the hours we spend on any task or activity and see if we are making the most of our time. Maintaining and analyzing our log periodically will give us a better understanding of how we are spending our time and how we can improve it.
Make a list.–the discipline of working from a list does not come naturally to everybody. I am guilty of starting a list but forgetting along the way. When I do work with a list, the results are phenomenal. A list helps us avoid haphazardness. It is interesting to see people running about being busy, yet achieving very little. We can make a list of the goals we want to achieve and select and do them based on their importance. My wife swears by her list and it works for her because she is disciplined to follow it. A list will only work as far as we will stick to it.
Know your key skills.–how many of us know what our core skills are? Our core skills are those competencies we possess, which make us a cut above the rest. These skills usually come to us naturally, but we can also learn them. I believe everyone has something they are good at. They just have to discover what it is (coaching is helpful). Understanding what we are good at helps us optimize our lives and keeps us from wasting time. When we know our core skills, we enjoy what we do and it results in us being happier and healthier people. We should be deliberate about finding our core skills and work and them both at work and home.
Minimize, delegate and ignore.–we cannot get everything done in one go and some things will be more important than others. We ought to focus on the things we do best and everything else will find its place. The things we can’t manage on our own, we can get help to do them. There is no rule of life that says we must do everything by ourselves. There are things we think are important which are not, leave them alone. If something is not adding value to our lives, then forget it and move on. We should focus our efforts on what adds value to our lives and the lives of others. Time is too precious to waste on things of little or no value.
In the downtimes enjoy life.–we can’t spend 168 hours trying to change the world. We will burn out. When we have downtime, read a book, have a meaningful conversation, or just sit and commune with our inner thoughts. Spend less time on social media and more time discovering how we can infect the world with our unique brand of positivity. We should always remember we have one life to live and we can’t all of it to work. Recreation is as essential to the soul as water is to life.
168 hours is enough time for us to live abundantly, but we have to maximize all aspects of our lives. Our health and well-being are paramount don’t take it for granted. Set time for activities that bring us closer to family and friends. Devote time, energy, and resources to the things which lead to a better quality of life. We should always have control over our time. 168 hours wasted are 168 hours lost, and that’s a wasted life to live.
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