You’re always doing something. Your day is packed from the moment you open your eyes till the second your head hits the pillow.
Yet, you never stop saying things like, “I don’t have time,” or “How am I ever going to make time for everything?”
Worse still, the most important things in your life, like your goals, growth, relationship with God, well-being, and relationships, are constantly neglected.
And hey, it isn’t that you’re lazy and you’re sure you aren’t wasting time. In fact, you feel like you’re always rushing, responding, and on the go. But deep down, you know you’re not moving forward where it matters most.
Sadly, that’s the silent frustration many people go through – trying to fit everything in their lives into 24 hours without success.
If this is you, you want to read this post to the last word. I’ll show you how to deal with your time constraints so you can make time for everything in your life.
You can’t afford to keep living busy and missing out on your own life. Why not let us fix that together?
Why You Struggle to Make Time for Everything
Want to know the bitter truth about why you have not been able to make time for everything?
You can’t. You cannot make time for everything because ‘everything’ is quite a broad spectrum and impossible to achieve.
What you should actually be making time for are the things that matter. I mean, you should rephrase your question to “how do I ever make time for the things that matter?”
Now, here are other reasons you struggle to make time for the things that matter in your life:
- You’ve not clearly defined what’s ‘important.’
- You’ve been overcommitting out of guilt or people-pleasing.
- You’re running your life on autopilot instead of practicing intentional living.
- Fear of missing out or failure keeps us distracted.
How to Start Making Time for What Really Matters
Define your ‘important’
Have you?
Because you really cannot get the important things done when you do not know what those important things are.
When you understand your priorities, you will stop confusing urgency with importance. That’s because every time spent ‘urgently’ doing the things that do not really matter equals time lost over the things that truly matter.
To define what is important, you need to start from your core. Start from your life’s purpose, move towards your values, and then hover around your long and short-term goals and vision.
You want to ensure that the things you categorize as important are aligned with your life’s goal. Otherwise, you might start living against the tide and creating unnecessary frustrations.
A question you can ask yourself at the start of each day, week, month, or year is this: what are the top 3 things that are most important for my overall well-being and growth?
Audit your current time use
Obviously, if you’re looking to make time for everything, you’ll need to understand how you are currently using time.
You need to understand precisely where your time is going to be able to tweak things to accommodate the things that matter within your 24 hours.
Take our Time Management Quiz to see where your time goes.
You can also start a time log to observe how you spend every hour in an entire week. Your goal isn’t to change anything. Simply focus on understanding how you use your time.
When you are able to get an overview of how you use your time, you’ll understand how much time you’re putting into the important and not-so-important things, respectively.
Set non-negotiables and boundaries
Now that you are clear on what’s important and what’s not, the important things will not automatically start to rank on top of your time consumption list.
Absolutely not!
Other less important stuff (you’re used to prioritizing) will surely try to displace the critical things and find their way to the top of that list.
One way to stop this automatic displacement is by putting up firm boundary walls around the important things in your life.
Setting boundaries around the important things in your life looks like:
- Setting time boundaries like, “I won’t entertain work calls after 9 pm.”
- Putting up emotional boundaries like, “I won’t allow other people’s negligence to become an emergency for me.”
- Setting boundaries around your energy. They can look like limiting social plans to weekends or once a month or deliberately avoiding people who drain you.
- Setting digital boundaries to limit online distractions. Think about social media detox and turning off notifications during your focus hours.
Schedule time for the things that matter
The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
– Stephen Covey.
It is not enough to simply clarify the important things in your life. If you will make time to do them, you must be super clear on when you want to do them. This is where scheduling comes in.
Always prioritize picking an exact period for when you want to do the things that matter to you. And when I say ‘exact time,’ I mean as precise as saying, “I will read a chapter of that book at 8 pm every Wednesday.”
Scheduling has now been made super easy. Use your Google or Apple Calendars alongside reminders and alarms to set out time to do the things that matter to you.
Eliminate distractions
Oftentimes, people who complain about not having enough time every day are actually battling serious distractions.
And, of course, distractions can be excessive scrolling, unnecessary conversations, and binge-watching movies. But those are not the only things that can distract you from doing what’s important.
Anything you do that directly or indirectly limits how much time you spend on the things that truly matter to you is a distraction.
In other words, when you try to make time for everything, you’re simply distracting yourself. Fish out those distractions and get them out of your schedule.
Another way you can eliminate distractions to make time for what truly matters is by working within time blocks. You can use apps like One Sec to ensure that your priority task is the only thing you’re doing within the scheduled period.
Delegate or outsource some of those things
The truth is that not everything you need to get done can fit into the 24 hours of your day. But does that mean you let the things that don’t fit go?
This is where delegation comes in.
If you have the means, you may need to let someone else complete those important (or significantly urgent) things for you.
As an example, if you are a career professional juggling a 9-5 with family life, you may need to delegate activities like house chores, cooking, and social media management to someone else.
If you do not have the funds to pay someone, find ways to delegate in exchange for something. Trust me, there’s something other than money you can offer people to complete specific tasks for you.
If it feels awkward asking people for help, read this blog to see why you shouldn’t be ashamed to ask people for help, especially unpaid help.
What Happens When You Don’t Make Time for the Things that Matter?
Do we really need to talk about this? Or aren’t you already feeling the consequences of not being able to make room for the things that matter to you?
I’m sure those consequences are looking like:
- Constant frustration and burnout
- Shallow or severely strained relationships
- Poor mental and physical health
- Spiritual and personal stagnation
- Regret over lost years and missed purpose
Conclusion
Well, it’s now apparent that you cannot make time for everything. The best you can do is to make room for everything that truly matters.
What you need to do is to first define and be clear on what truly matters, then set firm boundaries around them. Afterward, you must remove things that prevent you from focusing on the things that truly matter to you.
Take our Time Management Quiz as a first step to mastering your time.
