The Myth of “I Don’t Have Time”
How to find time for anything in life
I was in a coffee shop with a good friend this week when he told me about his underpaying job. So I was like “Why don’t you look for something else?” so he said “I have no skills”, and I was like:
“Well, learn new skills!”
“I have no time”, he said.
So we went on and talked about how he simply doesn’t want to learn new skills or change his current underpaying job. It’s not about time, it’s about priorities. Time is not an object, so you can’t say “I DON’T HAVE TIME” because you do. Everyone has time.
People have time to eat, sleep, and check their social media feeds. Why? Because these are priorities for them.
Every person in this world wants to be successful, learn new skills, start a side hustle, or start a business. But most of them don’t!
So what’s the problem?
The problem is that this event or action that you keep procrastinating to do is not a priority to you. In short, you do have time. You just choose to use it differently.
Everyone has the same 24 hours per day. How we choose to use it determines what we have the time to do.
The most successful and the least successful people in the world have the same amount of time, they all have families and responsibilities, they all have to sleep at night. The difference is just how they use their available time.
A few months ago, I built an app called Systemize, my goal was to help hundreds of people achieve more in their lives. Here’s the thing, all of them have families and friends, all of them use social media, and all of them have jobs.
But they choose to change.
You don’t need 40 hours per day to be successful, because if you don’t have time with 24 hours, you won’t have time even with 40 hours a day.
Parkinson’s Law says “the amount of work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. This means that if you give yourself a week to complete a two-hour task, then (psychologically speaking) the task will increase in complexity and become more daunting so as to fill that week.
However, if you set yourself a specific deadline for everything you do in life, you will be surprised by how easy things can be done. You can run a marathon by running 30 minutes a day, you can read 30 books by reading 30 minutes every day. Small systems add up to become a big goal.
Psychologically, when you set yourself a big goal like “write a book”, your mind will start procrastinating because this goal is so overwhelming. You feel tired, lazy, you want to take a nap, you want to relax, you don’t want to “write a book”. However, instead of committing to writing a book, commit to “Write for 1 hour every day from 9 am to 10 am”, now this is something your brain can handle.
Set Systems
Let’s be honest — we’ve all set goals that we’ve never met.
From broken New Year’s resolutions to a failed career as the next big rockstar, goals have a nasty habit of not being met.
Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, thinks much the same in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.
He identifies that everything wrong with goals can be solved by instead applying a regular system to complete your tasks.
The idea of systems is to set a small repeatable set of actions instead of considering the overarching goal that they’re working towards. These systems can be anything like “Spend 30 minutes learning Spanish every day” or “Walk for 15 minutes every Sunday”, or “Read for 1 hour”. These small actions won’t take too much time from your day, and you can’t say I don’t have 30 minutes to learn a new language because even Elon Musk has time to play video games and he’s running 3 multi-billion dollar companies at the same time! So what’s your excuse?!
These systems become even more effective if you set a specific time to do them. Studies have shown that 91% of people who choose a time for their systems are more likely to finish their systems. However, only 34% of people who didn’t set a deadline committed to their systems.
Busy is not the problem
“We all get so busy that we tend to think that we’re really alone, that maybe there’s something wrong with us, and we just can’t keep it all together. But it’s really a very pervasive problem,” says Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time.
We think we’re too busy reading, running, or spending time with people we love, but we’re not.
Let’s try something.
Take a pen and a paper or open your notes app and write your most important things in life sorted by priority.
Family? Work? Health? Friends? Money? Happiness? Facebook? Twitter? TV?…etc.
Now think about it, are you spending most of your time with the things that matter to you the most? If not, then you’re either spending most of your time on the wrong thing or you set the wrong priorities.
Think about it for a moment. Do you care more about Facebook or your health? TV or Happiness? Family or YouTube?
The thing is that we all have the same amount of time, but everyone has his own way of using his time. Some people like spending time with family, improving their health, and doing things that make them happy. While others like to spend their time on social media, working for 12 hours a day, and eating unhealthy food.
You still have time to change. And you still have time to do things that matter the most to you. So what are you going to do? Let me know in the comments below 👇👇👇
If you want to achieve more goals and create new habits, you can download Systemize for Free. It’s a habit tracker app where you can create systems and track your progress over time to make achieving goals easier.
