Six Secrets to Tame your Time: Secret #6
(<4 minute read time)
If you’ve gotten this far, you’re pretty motivated to gain control of your schedule and manage your time well. Now, you just need to know how to make it really stick this time.
The trick here is not will-power. It’s not gritting your teeth and pressing through. It’s not mantras or positive affirmations. The trick is based in science.
Your primitive brain does NOT want you to do all the things you just put on your calendar. Instead, it wants to convince you to:
- Seek pleasure
- Avoid pain
- Conserve energy
You must use your higher brain, the prefrontal cortex, to override these innate desires to make life easy & comfortable. You must monitor your thoughts. You must notice them and question them.
Most of us don’t do this. Instead, a thought appears (i.e. – “I don’t feel like going to the gym”), we accept it as truth and we honor it. Aaaaaaand, we don’t end up going to the gym. Instead, we end up busying ourselves with something else that is not a priority and then we wonder why we feel so stretched for time.
Here are some tips to avoid this common trap:
- Be specific – Always make your appointments results-based appointments. Never, ever make an appointment that is too vague. For example, “Work on resume” means far less than “Choose new resume template”. This keeps you focused and far more efficient. Plus, you get the satisfaction of completing mini-goals along the way!
- Anticipate your commitment level – Only put appointments on your calendar that you are 100% committed to doing. Your calendar is NOT a To-Do list, it is an appointment book. Make the appointments for the time of day when you know you’re able to do them.
- Honor your appointments with yourself – Treat them the same as you would if it were a meeting with someone else. We’re often much more committed to other people than our own selves. Consider any appointments with yourself the same as if a friend were waiting for you at a restaurant or an important meeting with your boss at work. Your relationship with yourself is more important than those relationships could ever be.
- Plan for obstacles – Consider all of the things that could get in the way. Write them all down. Then, beside each obstacle identify at least one strategy to overcome it.
- No motivation? No problem. – Expect that when the time comes you won’t feel like doing it. Nothing has gone wrong, it’s completely normal. The secret is to be willing to experience the discomfort of doing something you do not feel like doing, and just go do it anyway. Sometimes motivation and inspiration are just a bonus. Often getting started is the hardest part and you’ll quickly forget about that bad case of the “I don’t wanna’s”.
- Pitch perfectionism – Feeling like we have to do it perfectly can make any task seem daunting. Go into the task committed to the result and committed to doing your best to get it to “good enough”. You can always go back and refine things later.
- Celebrate good times c’mon! – Consider how you can reward yourself for following through on what you said you would do. This doesn’t have to be time-consuming. It can be as simple as taking a 5-minute break in between tasks. Or, an even faster one that I love is changing the color of the tasks/appointments on my Google calendar as I complete them. It gives me such a sense of satisfaction to look back at the end of the day and see all of those blue appointments turned purple!
If you follow this process you will develop an amazing relationship with yourself. You will begin to believe that you really can create any result you want in life. You will trust that when you say you will do something you will do it. You will know that if something goes on your calendar it is as good as done because of the integrity you have with yourself.
If it feels like this is all just too much or too hard, wait – don’t give up yet. Let’s chat, I can definitely help.
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