11 July 2022

Not only do you need to value your own time, like I said last week, you also need to always make valuable time for yourself to just think.
The trick is to free up time for ourselves, so that we have less to do and so that we will then have more time to just think. But this is usually very difficult to do, as we always seem to be constantly chasing our tails, with so much that we always have to do on our plates everyday.
Many things follow ‘Parkinson’s Law’ which says, if you remember, work expands to fill the time available for its completion. For example, how often do you find that a task that should only take you five minutes to do, will then often end up taking you an hour to do, if you have an hour available? In fact, often, simple tasks just increase in complexity to fill up the time that is allocated to them.
However, the reverse is also true because, as the time allocated to a task becomes shorter, the task becomes simpler! You can even use this concept further, because if you then free up time, you then will have more time to think about how to do things better and also, rather than expanding tasks to fill up your time, you free up time to think more about how then to free up more of your time!
You can even push this a bit further still, because when you free up more time to think again and again, you will create even more and more time for yourself to think again and again! You have to try this yourself genuinely for a while to see that it really works. Don’t give up if it doesn’t work for you the first time you try it; just start with the broad concept and constantly tweak or refine it as you go along.
The difficulty is that you often feel that you do not have time to think, as you feel that you always have to do everything you think of. You therefore do not then purposely make time to think. But when you make more time to think, you also realise that you did not need to do everything that you thought that you did, so you then purposely create more time for yourself to think! It is circular again, isn’t it?
Remember this myth, that you are more effective when you are more busy, or that you are more productive when you work harder. This old mentality permeates our lives and both we and others unconsciously believe it. It doesn’t make sense, does it? How are you more productive and effective by doing less and not working as hard? But it is not true, especially now, with more ‘thinking’, not ‘manual’ jobs.
You need to test this for yourself by making time everyday for thinking, or perhaps try to create a new habit or routine by setting a repeating task or planned time everyday in your diary to just think. You also find that if you do this thinking earlier in the day, it will be done quicker and also then free up a lot of time during the rest of the day, where you can think of how you can do things better the next day!
Finally, we sometimes have also developed limiting beliefs about what we can and cannot do, which get in the way of what we want to do. For example, if you hear yourself saying unconsciously to yourself that you are unsure whether you are good enough to do something, that is a limiting belief that constrains you. You therefore need to change this thinking, which will also require time to think about.
So, this week, try and free up more time for yourself to think about things if you can. You may be surprised by how much more productive and effective you are by working less hard and being less busy!




