Tick tock
I am a sucker for a good productivity or time management book. I love the little tips and tricks and hacks and shortcuts. They’re like endless little games you get to play to optimize what you’re working with.
After listening to a recent podcast on time poverty – a term being thrown around a lot recently that refers to that feeling that we can never get done everything that needs doing – those tasty little tips and tricks seemed suddenly like the Lucky Charms of breakfast: a hit of sweet and then depletion and disappointment.
Because here’s the thing. Little strategies to optimize our time or make things more efficient work great up to a point – but that point has a hard stop when it comes to determining if we’re even using our time on the right things to begin with.
There is, has been, and always will be more things we need to do, want to do, and are asked to do than there is time for those things.
So…why are we even trying to do it all when we know it’s a never ending treadmill?
The real work, the actual hard part, is not in the overexerting (although that is definitely tough). It’s in making hard choices. The kind of choices that comes from looking at what you’re doing and deciding to release the things that we do not feel deeply aligned with doing.
Those choices are hard to make not only because we’ve trained ourselves to think of everything we’re doing as essential, but we’re also largely unwilling to face potential repercussions of making some of those cuts.
Well – we have to start somewhere. So if you’re up for it, try working through these questions to start sorting and sifting through all the things sucking up your time:
Who is this for REALLY? (Is it actually for me, or is it for someone else?)
How does this support what matters to me? (And if it doesn’t, what is the real reason I’m doing it?)
If I removed this thing, what would that release me to do? (And which of those things ultimately matter more to me?)
What are you waiting for?
