When Did Life Get So Darn Busy?

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Inside The Edge

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Four Cents

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Jamie O’Neill’s “My Four Cents” articles offer a great change of pace from the typical literature you may find on a management consultant or leadership development web site. Most of the time, self-improvement is about assessing and amending your personal skills; however, every once in a while it is necessary to take a step back from it all and consider broader topics like your personal values and goals. “My Four Cents” forces you to do exactly that.

With her down-to-earth and practical perspectives, Jamie offers a view of the world that everyone can derive some value from. The articles in this section allow you to remove yourself from day to day trails and focus on what you consider to be truly important in your life. So take the time to read a few; we think they will really help… but hey, that’s just our four cents.

Alright, we get it, life is fast paced and in order to succeed, we need to pick up the pace to keep in line or sprint to stay ahead of the game. We are expected to do less with more and when life hands us lemons, we are not only expected to make lemonade, but we are expected to promote it, sell it, and set-up a franchise to support it. When did life get so darn busy?

No matter who you seem to ask these days, people are just plain busy. I pride myself in being able to work full-time and raise a young family (my daughter is 3, my son just turned 1) but still, in order to get ahead, I should also volunteer my time, take continuing education courses and let’s not forget, spending at least 1 hour a day at the gym . But the question always is, where do we find the time and when exactly do I get a little “me” time?

Obviously all of our moaning and groaning won’t change Father Time’s mind (there are and will always be just 24 hours in a day) and since we can’t bottle time, what are we to do?

There are probably thousands of books on the market about time management skills but let’s face it, none of us have any time to read them and I would argue that the ones that do read these books probably don’t have a time management issue to begin with. I truly believe that it is not time that is our enemy, it is our own self-expectations and priorities that hurt us. As Henry David Thoreau said, "It is not enough to ask why you are so busy. The question is, what are you so busy about?"

When people start to organize their schedule, we tend to gravitate to creating a To Do List, but have you ever created a Do Not Do List? A Do Not Do List is a lot like a To Do List, but on this list, you write out everything that you are not going to do. Look at your schedule today, are there things that you’re doing that someone else in your office of team could handle quite easily? Are there things that you are doing that create little or no real value? Creating a Do Not Do List forces us to put pen to paper and list out what things we just simply should not be doing.

We can no longer afford to play the victim of our own schedule, we are all busy. Take charge of your time and make it work for you instead of the other way around - but that’s just my 4 cents!