We all have the same 24 hours a day
What is stopping you from being achieving your greatness???
“I don’t have the time to do it!”
“I’m so packed with other things right now…”
“It because you have the right job so you have the extra time to do these.”
I believe these few sentences sound very familiar to many of us.
I was just having a conversation over coffee with one of my clients the other day and we were talking about getting things done up.
I was sharing to him some of the ways that I’m using to clean off my New Year’s resolution list. And the conversation became intense when he got frustrated and said this…
“Of course you’re able to do it given all your condition…
I have a full-time job that I’m committed to and it’s not easy for me to squeeze out time to pursue what I want.
I need the money so that I am able to get the freedom to chase over my dreams!”
I can sense so much frustration from him. Trapped in the loop of thinking which one comes first. Money or our dreams?
It will happen to the best of all of us, including me. I was once like that in the early days of my career.
But here’s the truth, we all have the same time as everyone else. 24 hours a day.
Yes, this is reality giving all of us a huge slap in the face! We all have the same 24 hours as all of the top performers in the world, celebrities, athletes, prime ministers and etc.
It’s not the issue of not having enough time, it’s the problem in managing time.
Too often, we always give ourselves the excuses that we don’t have the luxury of time. But that’s not the truth as everyone has the same time to spare.
As soon as I learned this fact, I began to find out why other high-performance leaders in the market are able to do what they are doing and yet still achieve more.
Take exercise for an example, most of the top market leaders in the world shares that exercise is essential to their career build.
In the book High-Performance Habit, Brendon Burchard shares the importance of exercising to keep the brain cognitive level at a higher performance state.
And these are all done by CEO’s that manages a multi-million organisation. They have tons of daily meetings, appointments and task to attend to, yet they are still able to take out an hour or half a day to work out.
What does that tell you?
It made me realise that there must be something that I’m missing, and I’m not doing right.
So, I went around and asked for advice. I even took the effort to attend time management seminars to help me figured out how can I squeeze more time.
And I learn these:
The 3 breakdowns of time
When we talk about time, we can basically break it down to 3 major groups.
- 1/3 of our time is used on sleeping
- 1/3 of our time is used for working
- 1/3 of our time is used on miscellaneous task (i.e. commuting, eating, toilet breaks, shower and hobby.)
When you see the break down above you can pretty much see that if we divide 24 hours to 3 parts, we have 8 hours for each category.
8 hours of sleep is recommended by the America Health Association, with good sleep you can perform better. So, it is not advisable for you to throw away your sleeping time.
Everyone needs to work, 8 hours of working is the average working hours for the majority of people.
And finally 8 hours of ‘Me time’, that is, after you’ve deducted all of your miscellaneous daily tasks (i.e. commuting time, toilet breaks, procrastination moments and etc).
With all that in mind, you can see that we really don’t have much time to spare in order to chase our dreams.
So how others do it?
This brings me to my second point…
You need to learn how to prioritise your time management
While we all need our own ‘me time’. We have to keep in our minds that our time is limited as well.
The first thing I did was to get a goal that I want to achieve in 12 months and I work backwards.
I didn’t start off as a copywriter or marketer. In my early days, I was just a salesman selling factory machinery lubricants.
Every day I will travel thousands of kilometres to secluded industrial zones to pitch my products to my potential clients.
That job was a grind, it was tough and my pay was peanuts.
It was my dream to work in an advertising firm writing great copies for my clients, but sadly, I wasn’t given the opportunity in the beginning.
But that didn’t stop me, every day, almost without fail I would take out an hour of my time dedicated to reading good written contents and another hour practising writing good copies.
Despite my love for gaming, I knew this was something I really wanted and I made the ‘sacrifice’ of gaming to hone my writing skills.
The best way to manage your time is to know where the time is being spent.
One of the best ways for me to practice time management was to log my time. You can do it in multiple ways, record it in a notebook, or digitise it.
My method was simple, I used an excel sheet and log my time between 15 minutes of intervals. Be it time that I used on browsing social media, preparing lunch or hitting the gym, I will just log it in.
The picture shown is my personal work time log. I did this to try to time my average weekly work hours. As you can see, I separate each frame into 15min sections. The short amount of frame allows me to pinpoint further the details of my activity at that particular time.
I know that it is annoying yo key in, so instead of keying in what I did every 15 minutes, I would do that every half hour or an hour depending on how focused I am on my work.
The results were phenomenal, my efficiency increase over time because I found that I was spending too much time on certain tasks that should be finished within a certain time frame.
This got me to really look into what was I really doing and fix the issue. With this method, I was able to get more time out because I was more aware of the way I spend my time.
However, this is a self-discipline effort!
While methods and formulas are helpful to help us manage certain tasks, we still need to be disciplined enough to take action.
It was very tough at the beginning. Like for real!
Just imagine a guy like me that quit corporate to gain flexibility, by logging my time on a sheet it’s like corporate all over again.
However, all those efforts were worth it. At the end of the day, I slowly ditched away certain habits and lifestyle that was a waste of time for my career.
We all have the same 24 hours a day.
If time is a form of currency, then I’d say all of us have the same amount of wealth. Yes, there might be people with circumstances and struggles we don’t know of. But I do believe that everyone is fighting their own devils to a certain extent.
But also remember this,
You’re racing against yourself, not others.
Don’t get stressed up by what others are doing.
The main reason we fall into the thought of, “I don’t have the bloody time!” is partly due to us comparing with others in their progress.
Everyone has different progress, yes some are more fortunate, some are not. But that is not the excuse to put your greatness at a halt.
Do what you can at your best capacity, make the best out of each and every minute and second of the time that you have.
If you need to take a long commute to work and back home, use that time to read some books. If your work has long interval breaks, use that time as well.
And if you’re a freelancer like I am, take every second of your free time to keep yourself updated with the knowledge relevant to your industry.
It’s all about discipline and consistency. Once you do it long enough, it’ll become a habit. And this habit will eventually lead you into a successful life.
