Prioritizing your time

Like other resources, time provides a measure of our priorities. How do you spend your time?

Peak productivity requires efficient use of your time for the highest impact. Perhaps the most common perceived barrier to more of what you want is time. All good things take time, but there are so many demands on our time that there never seems to be enough. There will always be more to do than you can do. There is always enough time to do what matters most, but with none to spare.

Intentional living will increase how much time you have. By pivoting your use of time to more productive ends, you will enjoy significant increases instant and long-term meaning in your life. It’s well worth the minor cost of paying attention to how much time you spend on your activities.

You are probably only aware of a fraction of the wealth of time, activity, energy, and emotion you presently waste each day because, apart from what you know you waste, there is so much you expend on something other than what is most important to you.

Most people consume the bulk of their attention on things that do not matter to them and do not generate progress on what does. Odds are that you waste hours per day, everyday, on things that do not matter at all to you. It’s quite likely you don’t realize how much time you are spending on things you would be embarrassed about. You might want to keep a log of your time spent over a few days, or at least check your phone activity record or your web browser history. As an experiment, write out how you spent your day yesterday, and identify the most important 80% of the impact of the day. You will find that those moments occupied only around 20% of your day. Just think how much extra time you would have if you replaced how you spent most of your day on tasks that produce greater meaning.

Most people consume the bulk of their attention worrying in ways that do not actually change their situation. So much time is wasted in worrying instead of acting¹ that it is no exaggeration that adopting more effective ways of thinking, feeling, and acting could leave you with as much as two or more times the time and energy you presently feel limited to. Imagine if you could double the time and energy you have!

You can’t even scratch the surface of your true potential while you are burning countless hours on activities that do not contribute to advancing your purpose. Every minute you waste on meaningless activities will obviously reduce the amount of meaning you feel in your life.

The tools provided in this book will help you look at how you presently spend your time with new eyes. As you apply the lessons in this book, you are going to find that great sums of time are available to recover that are presently being used in ways that are far less efficient than they could be, or used on things that don’t matter nearly as much as they currently seem to. As unbelievable as it may sound, you may find yourself feeling as if you have found an entire extra day’s worth of time each and every day by applying the lessons in this book. Imagine what you could do with another day each and every day.