It’s not easy to fit a million different tasks into a 24-hour day. However, once you prioritize your life, it becomes much easier.  The time we spend on tasks should correlate with our values and priorities.

If you kept a time log for a week, writing down everything you did and the time spent, it would reveal your patterns and trends and what you are spending time doing.  If you haven’t done this, it’s a great exercise.  It reveals distractions and time wasters and areas in which you can add time to more important things.  If you recognize that you are spending 2 hours per day on social media but are needing 1.5 hours to dedicate to personal development growth, you could decrease your social media time to 30 minutes and increase time for personal development to 1.5 hours.

If we take an honest look at how we spend our time, we can find pockets of time that can be shifted to other areas. If you need additional time, you may consider getting up earlier or going to bed later to have focused time for what you need. You may also discover extra activities, committee meetings, etc that you can decrease or eliminate.

The bottom line is to create and make time for what is most important to you. If family is important, carve out time each day/week to spend quality time together. I set aside time during dinner every day to connect with our kids and have family discussions or communicate with each other about our day.  Because this time is important to me, I guard it pretty tightly and try to schedule activities around it.

You will find time to do whatever is most important to you! Be careful of using the excuse, “I’m too busy or I don’t have time to exercise or to go back to school or to write a book.”  What you are really saying is, “Exercising, or going back to school, or writing a book, etc. is not a priority for me.  If in fact that goal is not a priority, that is fine. But if a goal is important to you, it is not okay to make an excuse of “I’m too busy.”

There are definitely advantages to prioritizing your life, aligning your goals with those priorities and regaining control of your life.

~Coletta Jones Patterson is an author, life coach, business coach, speaker and business executive who is passionate about helping others get unstuck. Her book, “Beyond Stuck: Creating the Life You Want” is available on Amazon.