TIME- what is your relationship with it? (and why it matters) -

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“The great dividing line between success and failure can be expressed in five words: “I did not have time.”
—Robert J. Hastings

Time is our most precious commodity. However, many of us go through life feeling starved of it. Many people I interact with personally and professionally struggle daily and feel that that they do not have enough time in the world to get things done. However, if you really think about it, 24 hours is all that we get. Each and every one of us! Some people manage to do so much done with the time that they have, work towards their goals and live their life on their own terms. While others live life as if on autopilot, miss out in their true potential and constantly feel like there is more and more to do in less and less time.

So if you think about it, it is not so much about TIME really but our relationship with it. It also about how to effectively design our environment and make choices that are in alignment with our values. It about becoming aware of the constant interruptions and distractions that have become a part of our hectic, modern lives. It is about knowing how to use technology so that it works for us and not the other way around.

Your relationship with time

Most people don’t realise that their relationship with time is infact quite unsupportive and not serving them. If we can learn to change our relationship by changing the way we think about TIME, we can become more intentional and deliberate about how we spend our time. This alone could be our life changing.

Understand your current relationship with time by answering the following questions

(write down your answers preferably in a journal)

Do feel rushed and out of control at times?
Do you feel distracted when you are working on something?
Do feel time pressure building up during the day?
Do you multitask to get things done?
Do you have a never ending TO- DO list?

This activity should give you a sense of whether you need to do something about the choices that you are making in regards to time. This should get you started so that you think differently about which activities you want to choose over others.

However, the unfortunate truth is that our ability to CHOOSE how we spend our time has been largely forgotten. Infact, the ability to choose HOW we use our time is the greatest gift we have under our control.

What if….

you could find a way to get back this power to CHOOSE?

you could change your relationship with TIME itself?

you realised that knowing what you want and getting the RIGHT things done was more important than getting MORE things done

As you would have realised by now, it all starts with knowing exactly what you want. If we know what we stand for and where we are headed, we can understand what is truly important for us.

I would like you to think for a moment and see if you can come up with the top 5 values that are most important to you

(write down in a journal to make this activity more productive for you)

Is it

Relationships
Career
Health
Music
A hobby
Mindfulness
Money
Leadership
Independence
Others (be specific)

This activity should give you some idea about what is important to you. Now I want you to answer the following question…

“If you could do only ONE thing with your life what would it be?”

What changed for you after becoming clear on your core values?

Urgency versus importance

Even while it seems that there is more and more to get done, we are pulled in many different directions, constantly interrupted and distracted in today’s hyper-connected world. Too many of us have become kind of addicted to this pace of life and we have reached a stage where we are almost afraid to slow down.

We get a temporary high from solving real, urgent problems and it makes us feel good for a while. Unfortunately, we start treating most other things as urgent (even when they are not) and keep on working harder and smarter to get things done. For many us, this way of working makes us feel more and more dissatisfied, unbalanced and stressed. For busy moms like you and me, it gets even more difficult as we juggle professional and personal roles where keeping “busy” becomes a hallmark for productivity.

However, all the gains that we perceive as a result of our hard work often come at a high cost. The trade off is between our being “busy” and all the things mentioned in the list below

Not spending as much time with our family as we would like

Not taking out time to exercise

Not taking proper care of our health

Not doing the things that we love

Not taking out time to have fun and play

Keep in mind…

That your resources of time and energy are finite. You need to allocate them wisely during the day
Once you have realised that you cannot possibly do it all, ask yourself this question- “Which problem do I want”? In other words, you need to be clear about what you want to FOCUS on
Set healthy boundaries by learning to say NO– saying yes to yourself and what is important for you means that you will have to say NO to other commitments/opportunities at times.

I have shared some more strategies that you can implement in your life in my latest podcast episode on this topic. I also take you through a guided visualisation activity in this episode so that you can become clear on your core values. This clarity will help you align your life to what is important to you so that you can get started on becoming more deliberate about which areas of your life you need to spend time on.

As Stephen Covey had said

“Our lives are the results of our choices. To blame and accuse other people, the environment, or other extrinsic factors is to choose to empower those things to control us.”

“More TIME and less STRESS”- A FREE GUIDE FOR BUSY MOMS LIKE

I’m putting together a FREE GUIDE that would help moms like you get clear on your priorities and learn how to put a system in place so that you have more CLARITY, LESS STRESS and more TIME in your life. This guide will be in the form of an online quiz and a mini video training that I will be sharing with you on the 17th, Friday. Infact, you will be the first to know!

Click here to be notified when it’s released- https://aninditarungta.com/time/

CLICK HERE listen to the guided meditation “Appreciating the gift of TIME”