Tiny Leaps, Big Changes 585 - How to Make Time for Your Goals
In this episode, we look at simple ways to fit personal development into your day. Even if you only have 2 minutes free.
Join Tiny Leaps Plus: http://tinyleapsplus.com
Part 1: Presenting the Problem
Making time for yourself can be difficult. Between work, your family, regular chores of being an adult, your friends...etc life can get hectic and time can fly by quickly.
Part 2: Diving Deeper
This is even worse in today's world thanks to the expectation from many employers to be constantly connected and always on.
So how can you build personal development into your day when you just can't find the time? Or what do you do when the only time you have is the moments at the end of the day when you are too exhausted to do anything?
Well here an easy way to integrate personal development into your day to day life.
Part 3: The Solution
1. How much time do you truly have?
Something I've talked about in the past is that many of us feel we don't have the time to do something, but in actuality it's just that the time isn't available in one block.
The issue is that these hours are not concentrated and so they either go unnoticed or, even if you are aware of them, they are difficult to utilize.
Well the first step is to get an accurate understanding of what time you have available, even if that time is spread out. I'd start with doing an audit of your day. That means to live your life as normal but to take note of the moments throughout the day where something else could be done at the same time or where it feels too short and so nothing valuable gets done at all.
Do this audit for about a week to get an accurate average of this free time.
2. Get focused
The trick with making progress even when time and energy is limited is to be as focused as possible.
One major issue we all have with personal development is that we often try to improve our "lives" as a whole. We fail to recognize that our "lives" are actually made up of very distinct areas, each requiring different things to improve.
So improving our "life" is actually impossible. Instead, we need to aim to improve one area of our life at a time. Those improvements will trickle into the rest of your life thus leading to overall improvements.
So once you know how much time you actually have to work with it's time to pick an area like fitness, nutrition, finances, career, relationships, or mental health.
3. Pick your strategy
Certain activities and tasks are really not suited to limited chunks of time spread throughout the day.
When you have limited time, and that time is broken up throughout different moments of the day, you need to start thinking tiny and organized.
So if fitness is your focus, and you only have short, 5 minute sprints throughout the day, then finding routines that can maximize that time would be best.
It seems small and unimportant, but it's where the journey starts. Eventually it will become more of a priority in your life and you'll clear other things out to make it happen. But that won't happen unless you start where you are.