You Have Time For Everything You Want To Do

Yes. You have time for everything you want to do. What you can't is to do everything at the same time. You can't sleep and read at the same time, but you have time to sleep and time to read. Whenever you feel that you don't have time to do what you want to do it's simply because you are trying to do everything at the same time.

image: guckes.soup.io

You can't do too much at once. You can't have a demanding 8 to 5 job, run a side business, travel every week, and want to be present at every PTA meeting at your children's schools. You can't eat your cake/time and still have it.

The key to doing everything you want is taking time off a lot of things. Just like you take time off work in form of a leave to go for that vacation you've been planning for over a year, so also you should take time off attending all your friends' wedding and anniversaries to create time for that new skill you want to learn. 

If you do it right, you will always have time for things you want to do. It's not about time management, trying to suck the most out of time. It's about task management, doing one thing at a time. Even if you're wasting time, waste it on one thing at a time. If you want to visit Hawaii, it's like going to Dubai. All it will cost you is freed up days and some cash. If you keep complaining that you don't have time for it then you are either not serious about going or you have joined the task ranking crowding.

The task ranking crowd are the people who will tell you that reading is a better task than sleeping. They are constantly ranking tasks and giving more time to the things high up in their list and taking away time from things low down the list. They are the ones who will overwork and not even know what the principal of their child's school looks like until an emergency happens. They put a money value on every minute and spend each minute on tasks that will generate them the most value, until a lesser task becomes an emergency and threatens to destroy the value they've created. They live like machines, following strict rules and never wasting time. It's not a group you should be part of.

You need to see life as an experience, one you have to make memorable. Think back on your school life, was it the time you spent in the examination hall (the time that determined your destiny as a student, hence most valuable time) you remember or the time you wasted with friends? If you are normal it would be the later. Then you shouldn't keep living like you are in a university and everyday is exam day. You should learn to spend time on less valuable tasks, like wasting an afternoon at your child's school or watching a movie at the cinema the night before your high impact presentation at work. Put some memory in your daily experience. Put aside the big task and do the small task. Soon you will find that you have time for everything you want to do.