Managing Your Time – Have You Ever Been Too Busy To Finish Brushing Your Teeth?

How many times have you heard someone say, "I don’t have enough time?" or "There's never enough time." We are a society that runs from one thing to the next without ever really accomplishing what we want to do each day.

 

One of my favorite quotes is by H. Jackson Brown.  “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”

 

Sometimes I don’t know if this quote makes me feel better or worse.

Mostly I am inspired by it. Other times I feel inadequate. What secret did these masters possess? One thing we know for sure they all were using their God-given talents.  They all had a purpose – a reason for getting out of bed in the morning – a goal.

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At a seminar given by, Jeanne Hunt, I learned about setting goals and achieving them by managing my time. Before going to this seminar, I would wake up in the morning with so many things going through my head of what I needed to accomplish for the day, I would stop in the middle of brushing my teeth to pick up something I spied in another room that needed to be put away. Have you ever been too busy to finish brushing your teeth? Hopefully not.

 

For a long time one of the hardest things for me to do was concentrate on the present moment. When you are in the moment things go much more smoothly than if you were thinking about all of the other things you “could” or “should” be doing. Jeanne taught me how to write out the most important things I needed to do for the day. Now, I had been making daily lists of things to do for years, but I still could never get caught up. Then she dropped the bomb: only write down ten things to do for the day. “Ha!” I thought. “I have at least twenty things every day that need to be done.” I assumed her life, like the lives of the ones in the above quote must be must easier than mine – wrong! She kept talking, I kept listening. Then she dropped another bomb: if you don’t finish what is on your list for today, then tomorrow you will feel like you failed. Boy, did that hit home. So, I started writing only ten things down per day. Then I realized that I wasn’t even getting those ten things finished because they were big jobs for one day.

 

I started re-thinking about my days. I decided I would incorporate some goals and fun things. I allowed time for interruptions and getting side-tracked.  Then I decided to write down only five things per day that absolutely must get finished. I did this with a simple notebook and pen for a while – and it worked! It worked so well I had time to write two books in the summer of 2011. I thought to myself, "If this works for me, I bet it would help lots of women who feel overwhelmed.  

 

So - I developed the Life Planner - Discovering Yourself and Achieving Your Goals, because I wanted to help other people get their life in order and accomplish their goals, too. It contains five steps to becoming who and what you want to be, and a quote for every day that gets you motivated.

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