How to have more time , less stress and be fulfilled

Many of us live a life where we are always driven by so many TO DO’s that most of us are STRESSED out of our minds. We do so much everyday and at the end of the day we keep telling ourselves the same thing

“Gosh, I wish had more time to do the things that I really want do”

Well here’s a news flash

......”WE ALL HAVE ONLY 24 HOURS A DAY!!!”........

So how do successful people have more time to do so much whilst we don’t, what’s their secret? do they know some magic that we do not know of?

This was something that fascinated me and something that I sought out, out of necessity, as I was getting so much stressed of not being able to do the things that I wanted. When I found the answer to this, it just blew my mind of it’s simplicity and I wanted to give you all the chance to feel the same freedom and fulfillment that I am having.

So are you ready for the answer? if “Yes” then this five part series will guide you in this quest.

Let’s try first try to answer the question of how do successful people have more time than us, well the the simple answer is

…...........”SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE MAKE USE OF THE TIME WE WASTE”.........

Sounds pretty simple right, well I thought the same. But knowing and understanding are two completely different things. So I will try to make you understand this concept so it makes real sense and value to your life.

What is time?

First let’s try to understand what is time? the wikipedia description is  

“Time is a dimension in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future and also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them.”

Which makes sense, but let’s look at this from a different perspective, how many of us have had an experience where we had to do something that we did not like or hated and a minute looked like an eternity (waiting in a queue of a supermarket,washing the dishes, taking out trash etc...) or getting totally engrossed, completely immersed in something that you love, where time just flies or cease to exist (spending time with your loved ones, watching an exciting movie etc...). pretty interesting right?

So isn’t time really a feeling, an emotion?  When we are emotionally, passionately attached to what we are doing, we forget time and when we are emotionally detached from what we are doing, time just stalls and grinds to a halt.

What determines our emotions?

An emotion is a “meaning” that we give to some event that takes place in our life. The meaning that we give is determined by what we are focused on. So what we focus on we feel, and we tend to put our energy to what we focus on.

In this we find the magic  formula to managing our time. We need to manage what we focus on and that allows us to manage our time so we have more time for the things we want.

“Where your focus goes, energy flows” (Anthony Robbins)

Where do we spend our focus/emotions/time on?

If we are spending our time on what we focus on, then our problem of not having time for the things that are important  is due to us not putting our focus on the things that are important to us.

So where do we spend our time on? well lets try to figure out where we are normally spending time on. Look at the following figure.

Living in Delusional (not IMPORTANT and not URGENT)

Sometimes we tend to spend our time in doing things for a moment's pleasure which does not make sense. We tell ourselves stories to convince ourselves these acts as very important things to do, but are they really? When I was asked this question, I thought to myself that I may spend a little bit of time here and there, but it can’t be that bad.

So I took count of how much time I spent in front of my TV, well maybe 2 hours per day. If I did this for 1 week then that is 14 hours , for a month that is 56 hours almost 2 full days. This was a real shock to me. In 56 hours I could learn a new skill like to play the guitar, which was something that I was putting off as not having enough time to do.  

This was a wake up call for me, so I decided to make list of all the things that I am doing that were neither important or urgent to me, I was surprised to see how much time I could save by reducing these activities. The beauty was that I did not have to give up everything that I did, but I just reduced my time and focus that I spent on them.

In fact my advice for you is to do that right now. Just list down the things that you may be doing daily, weekly or monthly that is not empowering you, but you keep doing anyway.

Then ask yourself, are these really important or urgent things that needed to be done. If not

mark them down and just put how much time you might spend for a day or week on those. You will be shocked to see how much time you can gain by just doing this.

One more thing, if you do this once you will not get much benefit as you have become just interested, but if you keep doing this at least once a week and measure your progress you will see that each week you are gaining more and more time to do the things that you have always wanted to do and did not have time to do.

So ask yourself these questions

• What are the things I did last week which were neither important nor urgent, but you did because you wanted to get through the day?

• How much time did you spend on that?

• Do you do this regularly?

• What can you do instead, that would empower you?

 

Living in Distractional (not IMPORTANT but URGENT)

Have you ever done things which were really not important, but they just had to be done, and had to be done ASAP. Things that were maybe pushed on to us by others or we may have forgotten and suddenly remembered at the last minute.

Well I used to have an issue where I used to get up every morning and look at what I needed to do on that day. When I did this most of the things that came to my mind were things that were just very urgent, like to look at the items of clients who were shouting the most, look into requests / demands of people who were shouting the most, and worked on them. Even at work when someone just rushes in to my room and wants to talk to me or want get an idea, though these were not really important,I would spend a considerable amount of time and focus on them.

These types of activities distract us from doing the things that matter the most to us. In fact if we really look at it, we may be spending a considerable amount of our time in this area. If we tend to live more in this area then we will see that at the end of every day though we have done so much and most of the things that we have done do not make much sense or seem to matter that much. We have just moved through the day rather than lived that day to our fullest potential what is most important.

Now what I do is, I make sure that I plan my day by putting most of my time on the things that I feel are most important rather than what is urgent. Also when someone tries to enter my space with their urgency I stop them. There are many ways that this can be done and we just need to come up with a creative way.

But the first thing is to identify that we are spending our time and energy in these areas of our day  and how much time? if you can go back through last week and see where you spent your time on doing things which were just urgent but not really important maybe you will be able to find so much time for yourself.

So ask yourself the questions

• What are the things I did last week which had to be done because they were made urgent but were not really important?

• How much time did you spend on that?

• Do you do this regularly?

If you keep asking these questions regularly (at least weekly) you will see that you are getting focused more on doing what is most important to you and is not just responding to someone elses urgency. 

Living on Demand (IMPORTANT and URGENT)

Well this is what I believe most people spend their time in , specially the achievers, doing things which are very urgent and very important. With our busy schedules and work ethics we fool ourselves that  by always being busy with very important and urgent todo’s, we make ourselves very valuable. But this is such a delusion, eventually we end up creating a stressful life to us and the people around us. The issue here is as soon as we get overwhelmed we tend to waste our energy and focus on stressing ourselves rather than planning how to achieve these results.

There was a time in my life where I was feeling the same, where every day there were so many demands that were being put on me to do. So many important things which were needed to be completed like yesterday. Very important and so very very urgent. Day by day I was getting more stressed, frustrated and overwhelmed. I knew something was wrong and I needed to do something about this quickly.

This is when I learnt the art of identifying what are the most important things that would give me the most important results and once achieved would give me the energy and the juice to do the rest of the items. Once I identified these results then I could put all my energy and focus to complete each one by one. Then my stress just disappeared. I learnt to let go , just let go and be free. Just focus on the little that are the most important. You can find more information in this link.

Another reason for having to spend most of our time in this area is not putting the time for planning for the important results or not identifying the important results we want to achieve. This for me is a recipe for disaster.

Now don’t get me wrong, I know there will always be times when things which are impotant and urgent will come up, for example if we get a call saying that one of our loves ones have met with an accident then that is most definitely urgent and important, however we need to minimize time spent in here.

So ask yourself last week,

• What are the things which you spent time on which were important and urgent?

• Could you have planned early so that you could have avoided them from becoming urgent?

• When you had many things which were urgent and important, how much time you spent feeling overwhelmed without taking action on them?

 

Living in the Zone (IMPORTANT but not URGENT)

Now this is where we should target our focus on, planning our lives so that we can spend our time mostly on the areas which are important to us. This is where our juice is. If we can spend most of our time here then our lives would so much fulfilled.

So it’s now time to see how we live our life in the zone, So ask your self,

• What are the most important results / outcomes you would want to achieve for next week / next day?

• Are they really important? and by when do you want them to be done, Can they be schedule ?

• Can you enlist the help of someone to get them done (delegate or leverage) ?

• How can you measure if these are getting done?

• And finally what are the roadblock that you might encounter and how can you overcome them?

If we can live out of Delusional  , move away from Distractional we would have so much time added to our days. If we spend less time in Demand and most of our time in the Zone, then we will be living a fulfilled, stress free life.

In my next post I will explain how to live your life in the zone and plan your life to be really fulfilled, till then ask the above questions and plan your life to have more time, no stress and be fulfilled.