We promise to eat more carrot sticks in the weeks to come, but then the candy bar appears today. We swear we’re ready to make a business plan, and then we get an email alert. We promise to get our day organized—even buy the planner—and then the phone rings.
Lately, I’ve been hearing way too much from our customers that they “don’t have enough time.” They just don’t have enough time to do all the things they *should* for their business, their j-o-b (if they still have one), and their family.
“I am overwhelmed.”
Feeling that way, too?
Well, the challenge isn’t about managing your time better. You can’t manage time. There are only 24 hours in each day, every day, for all of us.
And the problem isn’t that you’re not a bad manager of your time—you are a bad tactician in the war inside your brain.
In the struggle between should and want, appreciate this: want never goes away. My time-challenged clients are really in a battle of want over should…
…because they don’t have a plan! They don’t have a plan for those times (which seem to arrive with some frequency) when they are tempted!
We are all just terrible at choosing between now and later, between candy bars or carrot sticks.
The trick is to accept that the now-you is not the person facing these choices. It is the future-you, and apparently future-you cannot be trusted to choose correctly.
The primal stupid monkey part in all of us would always choose the candy bar, oversee the lives of our teenage kids, and check our Facebook page rather than write a plan, follow it and call a prospect.
To “manage your time” you are actually managing YOU.
To “manage your time” you require a plan.
To “manage your time” now-you must trick future-you into doing what’s best for both of you. Your time is much better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises to “do it tomorrow.”
So using this new enlightenment, how to you adjust all those things you haven’t gotten to yet?
Go forth and do great things,
Martha Hanlon & Chris Williams
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