Where You Spend Your Time Says A-lot About Who You Will Become and Where You will Go.
As my husband and I get older we have realized the importance of where we put our time. Life gets faster, things get crazier and if you don’t truly understand the power and value of your time, you will struggle when you didn’t really need to.
Don’t get me wrong, struggle is a good thing from time to time. I believe struggle is where we grow as human beings, but if there is a way to avoid unnecessary struggle within your life, I would think you would want to take it.
We All Have The Same 24 Hours
Each day that we get to open our eyes, and see the people you love most around you is a blessing. Every living and breathing thing on this planet gets the same 24 hours a day.
The key differentiator, is how you decide to use your 24 hours. Eric Thomas, a famous motivational speaker, has a question he likes to ask his personal clients who reach out to him for one-on-one help.
The question is: How do you use your 24 hours?
Eric Thomas preaches that he can predict where you will be more or less in the next 5 years, simply by looking at your daily routine and your daily schedule. It resorts back to understanding the sheer power and value of your time.
This simply sheds light to the fact, that our time is our most valuable asset that we own. Too many people walk this earth not even coming to terms with the value of their own time. Don’t be one of those people. Sit down, think about your time; how do you spend your time? And, who do you spend it with?
Audit Your Time
Why don’t we pay more attention to how we spend our time?
Many people are so concerned about money, careers and success, but never take a moment to ask themselves, — where is my time going? Where do I spend the majority of my time and with whom?
By auditing your time, and writing it on paper, you will see a picture that perhaps you have never seen before. You probably never paid much attention to the things that are eating up most of your time. Consequently, this leads to not knowing what returns you are gaining from that investment of time. By auditing your time you are going to see things from a perspective that is really game changing, and will only force you to value your time differently.
What Is The ROI Of Your Time At Your Current Job?
I have worked at a few places over the course of my management career and I found that there are a lot of toxic people out there in the corporate world. I met some of the best people in my life working for different organizations, but I had to make moves and change industries to get to be a part of those teams and work with those great people.
Let’s face it, not too many people out there are willing to change careers or industries on the fly. Many people pick up a job, and stay there for years and years on end. The only time they really change gears, is if they are forced to. Which in my opinion, is a great recipe for disaster.
Most people will say that they spend the majority of their time at work. Well, have you ever stopped to audit that time at work?
Are you fulfilled within your current position?
How are you performing?
What quality of people are you surrounded by?
Are the people around you appreciating you and your work?
What help and resources do you have available to grow and expand?
How many transferrable skills have you gained?
Is your pay out growing you, or are you out growing your pay?
These are all great questions that not too many people are asking themselves often enough. Why? I believe, it’s because they do not understand the power of time.
See, where you put your time today, will have a great deal of influence over where you will be standing in the next 3-5 years. Don’t let a company or job steal your time. If your time at work is currently moving the needle for you in the right direction, then you are in a good spot! However, if you fall in the other category, it would be wise to start thinking about how much time is flying out the window that you can never get back.
Money, you can always try to recover. Time on the other hand, once it’s gone — there is no going back.
RR
Who Do you Spend Your Time With?
I learned about this years ago, when I was working at a job that made me miserable. I would wake up and feel depressed having to show up to my job. Then, I would spend 40 hours a week with people who had toxic tendencies and a very negative outlook on life and other people.
My drive home was my moment of disconnection. I would use my drive home to clear my head, and bring my mind back to a point of peace. Knowing I would be going home to a place of happiness and positivity helped me.
Throughout this job, is where I made the connection that although my job and my income was necessary, the people that I was surrounded with for 40 hours a week, years on end, were not necessary.
I later left that job, and was soon hired at a new company. This time, I was placed in a team that was highly functional, had great morale and this translated into a better version of me.
I benefited greatly from changing the investment of my time, and so did my family. This was my first introduction into understanding, that it is not just about where I am putting my time that matters, but equally as important is who I am spending my time with and the importance of my environments.
Eliminate Any Waste
We only have 24 hours a day, when you go and calculate the amount of time you use to sleep and eat, you then realize that those 24 hours are a-lot less. This only magnifies the importance of using our time towards the things that are going to make us better and happier versions of ourselves.
Taking inventory of your time, and auditing where you spend your time, is going to create awareness around the time that you are wasting on a daily basis.
Now, I want to clarify something; watching Netflix, or playing video games, or spending time with your friends, is Not a waste of time unless, you are abusing it. Watching some TV, or playing video games, can be a great way to disconnect and enjoy some leisure time. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it can be beneficial to the overall quality and happiness of your life. It’s when people abuse the hours spent on activities like these, where time slips by you.
Where I want for you to really pay attention, is to those moments where you catch yourself sitting at a job and you are doing nothing but waiting for the time to strike the hour when it is time to go home. If you find yourself doing this often, you are wasting your time. Time wasting moments also include situations where you are sitting on the couch or table and just don’t know what to do calling it “boredom.” Recognize this, and make a change sooner than later.
Learn to catch these moments, and then fill those slots of time with things that can help you grow and move forward in your personal life.
Things like: exercise, reading, working on a hobby, writing, working on your business — all of these can be just a start to finding different activities you can pick up to ensure you maximize the minutes and hours flying by you.
Decisions Today, Influence Your Situation Tomorrow
It is such a simple thing to read this subheading, and say “ok, yeah I get it.” But, in order to really get a grip over this, you need to slow down, block out the noise of society, and find your trajectory.
We are right where we are today, because of the decisions that we made 3-5 years ago. Pause, and think about that for a few seconds. We often blame others, or outside forces for our outcomes when things do not go our way. However, it is our own doing and decision making that creates our futures and outcomes. So, why are we still not valuing our time properly?
If you are not happy with your health, finances, career, job situation, school grades, relationships — whatever it may be; it’s your decisions over the past 3-5 years that got you here.
Understanding how valuable our time is, can be one of the greatest discoveries. I say this because, we can then shift towards the things that we want to spend our time doing. We shift away from things that we thought we wanted to do, but in reality we were never fulfilled.
Time is way too valuable for us to spend it doing things that just don’t bring out the best in ourselves. You have the power to shift the projection of your future. Will it be easy? Most likely not, but with time it can get better. Once you have figured things out a bit, you will find fulfillment and be glad you made the changes.
If you never get a hold of understanding the power of time, your life is going to fly by you, and you are simply going to be dealing with randomized outcomes. These random outcomes are based off of decisions you made which were then based off of where you were mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally during those times.
Don’t accept life happening to you, make life happen for you. Invest your time in areas, jobs, habits, activities and people that are going to help you get the return on investment you deserve.
Create Your Ideal Day And Get As Close To That As Possible
If you are reading this, and have made it this far, you are either a loyal fan 🙏 or, you are looking to make real change with how you spend your time. I like to ask myself questions during times of change.
Here are a few questions to help get you started:
If you could create your ideal daily schedule, what would that look like?
What does your ideal day look like?
What can you see yourself doing day in, and day out, with a high level of consistency and fulfillment?
If you could do anything in the world to make money for your family and your future, what would that look like?
Use questions to build your ideal day and ideal future. Feel free to add more questions for yourself when some good ones pop up.
Once you have created your ideal day, start to look for small opportunities that can start moving you towards that exact ideal day. Don’t settle for anything.
You may not be able to obtain and construct that exact day immediately, and be able to live it from here on out. It’s going to require patience and consistent action to make it a reality, which is the last bullet point we are going to get into. The goal here is to work towards that vision everyday.
It Takes Time To See Results & Real Change
You may read something like this and feel inspired, motivated, and ready to make changes! But wait, there is one last thing that comes with understanding the power of time…
Changes & Results take time.
Remember, the decisions you make today will impact where you will be in 3-5 years — the value of your time investments.
Learning to understand that you control your time, and the equation that where you put your time generates a return, is the answer to all your troubles. This principle makes life that much easier to navigate. We can’t control everything, but what we can control, is where we put our time.
If you want to be smarter, then spend more time studying. If you want to become a better salesperson, then spend more time working at it. The answer is in the time you are willing to spend on doing the things you need and love. In addition, understanding that whatever you do choose to put your time into, you may not see any significant changes for quite some time. This is perfectly normal. Society paints this picture that valuable things come easy and there are all these shortcuts and hacks. Well, I am here to tell you that does not exist. If you want something bad enough you can make it happen, it’s just going to require an immense amount of work and time from you.
Final Thoughts
I had to learn the hard way, that where I was putting my time was not worth the results. Often, we just let life happen to us, instead of us taking control of the steering wheel, and driving ourselves to where we want to go.
We build these dreams and these goals, and then we expect for things to fall out of the sky, and onto our laps. Success is not reached with that type of approach. In fact, in can be argued that you may die with your dreams, if you take that approach. Life becomes more hectic as the years pass you that you can lose sight of those goals and dreams easier than you think.
I believe, this happens to us because we are not aware that we get to control where we put our time. We can do anything that our hearts desire, if we are willing to dedicate our time to that special thing(s) that we love.
Learn to value your time, more than you value your money. Begin to realize that maybe your time is more valuable to you than sitting in an office all day for 40+ hours a week. Maybe, you want to take those same 40 hours, and put it into a different profession that will give you a better return on your time.
These are all things that we need to think about more often. Don’t just throw your time around and say “yes” to jobs, projects, friends and family just because you think you should. Slow down before saying “yes”, be certain and intentional with your time. If you could spend an extra day working on that business idea, then do it.
Put your time into the things that are going to help you grow and help the people around you grow. Every human that walks this planet is so different in so many unique and gifted ways, yet we all tend to follow the same paths.
Do not fall victim to allowing your time to pass you without you enjoying what you are doing each second, each minute, each hour, each day, each year and each decade. Envision your ideal day, and put all your time into doing those things. In the end, the results will be worth every second of your time.
