TICK TOCK - How I Raced Against The Clock

We all have the same 24 hours each day. Even Beyonce. I know what you’re thinking, she definitely doesn’t have to do as many ‘normal / real’ life things in her 24 hours as you do in yours! But ultimately, every single human shares an identical amount of time every single day of their lives.

Starting out on the road to entrepreneurship after my redundancy, I felt as though I had heaps of time. Not working, (apart from being the ‘holiday home cleaner’ doing twice weekly changeovers at my caravan!) gave me the perception that I had so much time to learn what I needed to and get started quickly on my business.

How wrong I was!

You’d think after existing for 396k hours, give or take, I’d be well aware there were 24 hours in a day. That every day has the same number of hours. And every hour has the same 60 minutes. But I seemed to be missing something.

I’ve always been pretty good at organising and planning what I need to do. I started each week with a long list of all the things I wanted to accomplish that week. It felt good. I’d put it all down, got it out of my head, and by doing so, committed to having it all ticked off by end of day Friday.

However, what I wanted to do and thought I could do, was in reality very different to what I actually had time to do. My expectation of what I would achieve in a day was too high. I was setting myself up to fail from the off.

I started each day thinking about what I needed to do from the weekly list that day. I’d plan it out in my head and get started. So efficient!

By 4pm I’d be flapping. I was hardly making a dent in that day’s list. I felt like I wasn’t doing much or enough, and that I was wasting lots of time. I felt like I was constantly head down, working diligently, but not making any progress. Why? 

I began stressing and getting more demoralised as each day passed.

Honestly, it felt like there was just so much to do, and that I wasn’t being effective.

Then I saw some chat in Facebook, and read a piece another entrepreneur had published about ‘time blocking’. It sounded interesting and straightforward. And as I get quite excited by the prospect of using new stationary, I quickly got onto Amazon and ordered myself a copy of Brendan Burchard’s ‘High Performance Planner’.

Wow! Game changer!!

Using this technique called ‘time blocking’ and the best-selling book, I started writing down my goals and putting the actions I needed to do to complete these goals into 30 minute time blocks. This was a big thing for me as I’ve been almost fully digital for a couple of years, so although I love new stationary, I’m not actually a writer of notes but a typer. Doing it in this format however, made me re-assess how much working time I actually had in a day. It provided the opportunity to assess how I was carving up my weekly goals into this time, and what I was putting on each days ‘To-Do’ list.

I loved seeing it visually, adding in my top 3 priorities for the day along with how I wanted to show up that day. The extra journalling and habit sections were great at focusing on my mindset, and considering how my thoughts and habits were effecting the way I worked.

And the biggest ‘AHA’ moment was realising there just weren’t enough hours in the day to work on what I thought I could. Despite being pretty competent at maths and knowing the number of minutes and hours in a day, it turned out I wasn’t very good at dividing the things I needed to do into the actual working time per day!

In only a few days, I started to have a sense of calm and could see that I’d been setting myself up for failure. I’d been starting off with far too many tasks and putting only a small dent in them, making me feel I hadn’t done enough and was falling behind. When in reality I was doing lots and achieving so much. 

It can be easy to feel like you’re failing and not progressing. We often focus only on what hasn’t been done and how many things are outstanding on our ever-growing ‘To-Do’ list. Our minds are set in default mode to go straight to these things and worry about when we’ll get to them. Instead we should be reflecting on what we have done and how much we’ve achieved. Taking some reward and satisfaction from these accomplishments.

Using the planner has helped put some perspective into my days and give a reality check on what time actually is. Yes, we do all have the same 24 hours in a day. But these 24 hours need to pack a lot in. Approaching it like a simple maths problem - dividing what you need to do most into the time you actually have to do them - could be the biggest, easiest, game changer to how you work, live and perform.

If you feel like you’re always running out of time and never get around to doing anything to look after your health and wellbeing, take a look at my FREE guide. It contains 5 great tips to help you start making time for a healthier you.

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