Do you find the statement above is familiar? Sure you do. What would you do when it happens to you?
- When we are student, we find that we need more time to study for exams (or to accomplish projects),
- When we are working, we need more time to finish our work before the deadline,
- When we are with someone we care about, we wish to spend more times with them
- and many other cases.. (you name it)
It happens to me (again) recently. So, here is what I learn.
When we find that 24 hours a day is not enough, let’s try to ask ourselves with these questions:
1. What is our priority?
Prioritize, prioritize and prioritize. We need to know clearly, what are our priorities in our life. It is not easy to put it into order, at first. Learning from others and practice make perfect. Try this:
- List all the big things in our life.
- Put a scale from one to the biggest number count of your list (i.e. 14 items give you 14 as the biggest number), and one represents the most important one.
- Don’t repeat the number.
- Once you done, rewrite the list according to the order.
2. What do we want to get by the end of the day, each day?
Set a target to accomplish each day. Don’t arrange too packed schedule on one day. Agenda is helping us to manage our life, not to kill ourselves. So, shouldn’t we shift some of the task to other day.. or we distribute it. We can try to do reverse engineering. For example:
- Total hour = 24 hours
- Basic activity: sleep 8 hours
- Working/going to school = 8 hours
- Having a meal: 1 hour x 3 = 3 hour
- …
Sum all the numbers up, and we can check whether we exceed our 24 hours. Of course, we can list all the things we need to do based on the earlier point, which is our priority in life. If we exceed, shouldn’t we adjust the time for our activity? Or maybe we are too ambitious to put a lot of things into our life?
3. Who do we do this for?
One of the common reasons is “I have to do this, because he/she told me so.. “, or “I have to do this because everyone is doing it”. Instead we should ask to ourselves, whether what we are going to do is aligned with our priority? or whether we are doing this just to become people pleaser?
(to be continued..)