The secret to achieving the important things in your life

Time is always something we desire more of however it is the one thing we cannot control - it is also a resource that is limited in nature. We all want more time in order to achieve more of our goals in life rather than seemingly spending more and more minutes on admin such as banking, grocery shopping etc. Therefore how can we ensure that we make better use of our time if solely for the purpose of not looking back at our life and regretting certain things we didn’t achieve simply due to a perceived lack of time.

The first step is to become aware of how you are actually spending your precious minutes on a daily basis and over the course of the week. Are you spending time on the tasks that will allow you to achieve your goals? Do you even know what those tasks are? Have you aligned your time to reflect the importance of the goals in your life? Have you even spent time considering what your goals are and what you need to do in order to achieve them? Habits can either aid you to achieve in life or detract from your ability to achieve. People may see habits as good or bad but I would prefer not to label them this way. A bad habit may have a useful purpose but only up to a certain point, therefore it is not necessarily bad.

The second step is to focus only on those actions that are proactively going to allow you to achieve your goals and to reduce or rid yourself of your habits that are not. One example is that of watching television. Now watching a certain amount of television may provide some benefits – enjoyment and relaxation being a couple. However at which point does watching television impact your ability to achieve your other goals? If you watch only five hours of your favourite programs rather than allow yourself ‘television creep’ (where you end up watching a lot more then intended) then you provide yourself with more hours automatically. What this means is that you should weight and rank your goals and the underlying tasks in order to know what you should spend more time on.

The third step is to identify ways and means to become more efficient with your time. Time means money simply because there is a financial opportunity cost attached to every second of your day. One hour less sleep or one hour less television produces two additional hours of earning activity. It also affects the quality of your life in respect to the time to spend on non-enjoyable tasks. Look for ways to double up on actions during the one time period. For example whilst cooking dinner listen to study CDs, work on your hobby on your laptop on the bus ride to work, sending out laundry, ensure all bills are paid via direct debit and listen to your favourite music whilst writing emails (and reduce the latter to once a day). Changing your habits is only as difficult as you wish to make it but it is advised to work with a professional coach in order to change your mentality and motivations behind how you choose to live your life. There is no better time to change then today. Realizing you wanted to make changes five years in the future (what they call hindsight) is not going to help you but if you can visualize right now how this might feel it will allow you to make the necessary changes in your habits.