I recently finished reading “The Big Leap” by Dr Gay Hendricks and the section about time reminded me of something from my childhood.

When I was practicing classical piano pieces as kid, I had a tendency to get faster and faster throughout the piece until the timing got completely out of control and jarringly random notes were sounding all over the place.  My mother would yell “TIME” to remind me it was more important to play it well than try to fit in as many notes into as short a time possible.  After awhile mum got tired of this and said “since you know you tend to get faster and faster, just think “TIME” to yourself from time-to-time (pun probably intend) to keep yourself in check”.     

In the book, Dr Hendricks reminds us that actually we have enough time to do anything that we want to do, it’s just a matter of whether or not any given thing is a high enough priority.  Although I, as I’m sure you do, already knew this, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded occasionally.  The language that I tended to use in the past “I don’t have enough time”, “there isn’t enough time” etc. tends to give the feeling that we are at the mercy of time, when in fact, as adults we choose (whether passively or actively) what we do with our time!

So how do we use this to practically make time for the things that we want to get done? Dr Hendricks has an answer for this too.  Don’t try and “ease” into the hard stuff… do things in order of priority.  If your priority is to write a paper but you start with the housework, guess what gets left off the list when things take longer than expected?  But if you start with the writing… you get the idea.

So now whenever I feel I’m not getting the things I should done, or I won’t be able to get everything done that I should, I remember,  “TIME” –there is enough to do the most important thing, if I do (or at least schedule) it first.

TIME to sign off…