Can't find the time?

I’m talking to you today about those things that are not getting done on your list that you tell yourself it’s simply about time – where you say things like: “I just need to take the time and do it, I just need to find the time and finish that.”

I have also told myself the same thing in the past, but you need to know that it’s not about the time. I have taken this frame of mind with certain projects that I wanted to get done. I thought, “I just need to grab a couple hours and finish that.” But then the time comes when I have taken a week off work, or we have a long weekend, and strangely enough when “more time” was available the thing still doesn't get done.

It's not about just magically finding the time. If it was about just the time, we would have finished it. I'm also not going to tell you that it's about priorities either. Usually, that's the next thing discussed – you hear, “it's not the time, it's just that you haven't prioritized it.” Really, though, when it comes down to prioritizing that's really also about time, because when we prioritize something that means we're going to take something else that we currently do and not do that, so that we can use that same time for this other project. Typically, time and priorities are not what's holding us back.

This is what I want to cover today. We go into depth on this during the Productivity Mastery session in our high performance coaching. In total there's 10 factors we discuss in that session, but today I'm going to cover three of these reasons that I see people not making the progress they want.

I want to encourage you to bring something to mind as we go through these – a goal or a dream you've been saying you want to work on but you haven't been working on.

The first one is called Delay Time. This refers to feeling like it's going to be too long before we see benefits to our actions. Maybe it's something like a weight loss goal where we know to expect to lose a pound or two a week. If you've got 15-20 pounds that you're wanting to lose, a pound or two a week can kind of seem like slow progress. If we don't have that feeling of getting rewarded as we go, then we're going to tend to avoid that activity in favor of others where we do feel rewarded. Delay Time is one of the major reasons that we aren't taking action on the goal.

The second one is called Opportunity Cost. What we mean by Opportunity Cost is feeling like the things you have to give up to take action on the goal are too great to want to give up. This could be time you want to spend doing something else or resources you want to spend another way. Using that example of weight loss, maybe the time that you would be using to work out is the time you go to happy hour with your friends or the time that you like to sleep in on Saturday mornings. You see the cost of taking that opportunity as too great in your mind.

We often don't ask these other questions of ourselves. We just stop and say, “I just don't have time for that.” But we might actually be avoiding taking action for other reasons. If we asked that deeper question, we might find the real reason that we are not acting on that goal or that dream that's important to us. By realizing what these things are, we can actually do things to help change our perspective.

The third one is called Personal Control. This refers to our feeling about how much we personally can affect this change that we want to see happen. This is especially big when we have a big goal. If we want something like a promotion, for example, well, we can't promote ourselves, we don't have full control over having this goal or this dream come to fruition. Sometimes we avoid the actions we personally can take because we just don't feel that sense of control over the outcome. Even in the example of weight loss, this could show up as something like feeling that our genes or a medical condition will prevent us from success. If we can't fully control all the factors, we tend to hold back.

It's important to ask these deeper questions if you want to make that progress that you haven't been seeing. As I mentioned, we cover 10 of these in our coaching sessions. I wanted to give you three today because I wanted to give you that little bit of a nudge to tell yourself to look deeper, beyond time.

If you are truly serious about making progress and you would like to talk one-on-one about coaching, please reach out to me send me a message. I really encourage you to take that next step, even if you're simply curious right now about what it would be like to work with a coach, and in what ways it could help you!