Time Invested Wisely = Your Dreams

This past Friday I was asked to speak with a person, who just signed into a home-based networking business -- which I know is one of the most effective entrepreneurial methods for an average person to achieve true financial success. My entire conversation/coaching session with this individual was based on the simple theme of working your plan and committing long-term with no thought of ever quitting until the achievement of your ultimate outcome.

What is the #1 point that you should stress to someone who decides to become your fellow teammate and business partner? I would definitely say that it is erase the following words from your vocabulary: I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day! Over the next 7 days, try keeping a detailed log of where you invest your time.

Time is the universal currency, which God blesses everyone with. However, it is those who choose to invest time wisely that succeed. Every winner in life could have easily said, “Well you know it sounds great, but I do not have the time to do anything.” You need to look deep into your spirit and realize that time is an incredible gift and you need to cherish the gift by investing it very effectively.

The overall attitude of most people these days is that everything is so hard for them but easier for everyone else. There is a very thin line between winning and losing, and it all begins with setting your mind to the correct channel - channel W for winning -- no matter whatever anyone else says or thinks. I know you can achieve all of your dreams in life if you just erase from your vocabulary, “I do not have the time.”

Take a minute right now and look at where you sow your time. Wherever you sow your time will ultimately determine your future harvest. Invest (sow) it wisely and achieve (reap) your Dreams! Be conscious of saying or hearing -"I do not have the time."

Find your WHY & FLY!

John Di Lemme
www.FindYourWhy.com

Questions to Ask Before Volunteering - Obligation

Volunteering is one of the most rewarding things you will do. You will receive as much for giving your time as the ones that benefit from your hard work. Volunteering will also be a frustrating experience if you do not consider the answers to a few questions before you commit your time and energy. One of these questions is "Do you know what your true obligation will be?"

It has been my experience that the one that will be doing the volunteer work must estimate the amount of time required. In almost every situation where I have considered a volunteer position in the past, I was told it would take considerably less time than what I felt was needed to do a quality job.

They may be concerned that you will be scared off if you knew how many hours it would really take. Maybe they don’t have the skills required to assess the amount of time it would actually take. It may also be that they are stating what someone else told them and the estimate was not based on the current tasks and circumstances.

Regardless of what you are told about the amount of time it will take and the skills that will be required, be sure you learn enough about the expectations of the job to make your own informed decision. By doing this, you will know if you will be able to give your volunteering responsibilities the attention they deserve while also considering the other important priorities in your life. If you believe the commitment will be considerably more than you can bear, find another volunteer opportunity that will be a better match for you. Once you participate in positive volunteer experiences over time, you will find ways to dedicate more time to volunteer.

Work, Work, Work: Making Each Moment Count

Time, time, time. It seems there is never enough of this precious life support. In a previous story about time, I quoted the following aphorism:

TIME IS MY FRIEND
TIME IS MY ALLY
I HAVE ALL THE TIME I NEED
FOR EVERYTHING I WANT TO DO.

I received a lot of grateful responses and some questions, indicating just how hard it is to balance our time requests these days. I want to respond to a subscriber who said she is "too busy to attend to personal needs vs. work, work, work" and is looking for a way to take care of herself while meeting the requirements of her workplace.

Here are a couple of suggestions for anyone who is struggling to keep work and personal life in balance.

First, don't judge yourself about where you're spending your time. Wherever you are, be there 100 percent. If you're working, try to notice why you said yes to the work and enjoy that part of it. Enjoy the moment.

Second, use your calendar or daytimer as a tool to give you what you want. Mark it with work and personal time, and attend to it. For example, I'm writing a book, and it's very easy for me to let that time slip into something else, like answering email or returning calls. I'm getting better at blocking out the time in advance and sticking with what I said I was going to do with it.

Lastly, prioritize your values around time. If personal time is the highest priority, mark the personal time into your calendar first. Then fill in the other stuff in around it.

I hope some of this helps. Please write and let me know if any of the suggestions work for you. And let me know your ideas, too, because I need them!

Personality Test- Your Time Management

All of us have heard quite a lot about time management. Thousands of books have appeared on this subject. The objective of time management is - how to set priorities, how to allocate time, how to effectively use it and how to get the best of the given time.

After learning all this and implementing, most of the people manage to implement only a part over long term. Write down today's work, and give it priority ranks. Nothing more is done by a large majority. How is your time management? What skills have you developed in this and can you measure the increase in effectiveness?

Do you assign time to every work? If yes, is that allocation on the higher side or lower side? With higher allocation of time, you will waste it and with lower allocation, you will undergo stress. How do you do that? I have a small suggestion. Estimate fair time and give a tolerance of about twenty five percent to that. For example, if you allocate one hour to write a report, take fifteen minutes as tolerance. So you will not undergo stress at least till one and quarter hours.

Are you assigning time to unexpected developments? You might be working on an assignment and suddenly your client calls you with a complaint that needs immediate attention. What will happen to your schedule? It will all go haywire. To avoid time management problems here, separate the most important tasks that must be done in the given time and draw another list of tasks that can be safely postponed. This will help you avoid stress.

Time management is both an art and a science. Don't become its slave. Make it your tool to work efficiently. Avoid getting pressurized by your own goals.

How to Make More Time for Giving

Do you have a desire to spend more time giving to others but you don't know where the time is going to come from? Have you tried several time management approaches all of which gave limited results or didn't last beyond a few weeks or days? I had the same problem and so did my friend David.

David Perdew has just written a new book called "Bad Dad: 10 Keys to Regaining Trust", is developing and teaching an online course, makes time for his family, and works a full-time job. Some students in his class have recently stated they don't know how he does it all. I recently talked with David about his "secret." It was no surprise that he has learned what I have.

You need to determine what your values and life purpose are and then spend your time doing those things that are most important to fulfilling them. Everything else should be delegated to someone else or not done at all. If giving to others is high on your list of values, you will make the time to do it more and feel great about it.

I spent the energy to determine my values and life purpose in my mid-forties. Some people might think I was going through a mid-life crisis (or man-o-pause as my friend Nick would call it). You are never too young or old to take your life purpose seriously.

The following two books were very useful to me and I highly recommend them both:

- "The Power To Be Your Best" by Todd Duncan
- "The Purpose-Driven Life" by Rick Warren

If you don't know your life purpose at this point in your life, you need to take the time to discover it. It will be a life changing experience.

Your Thinking style - Test It

Thinking it is said is one of the toughest things to do. Many of us say that they will think about something and then revert. You must have heard this many times. Do these people really think? What do they do? Do they look at the problem in total perspective, think about different actions that could be taken and find out the consequences and then find out the best option? No, not many of us do that.

Most of us do sloppy thinking. We don't strain our mind, but find out a convenient answer that does not need much thinking and present that as their conclusion. We come across many issues in our life. Dating, studying, taking a career, selecting a job, look for a home, and so on. Do we think about every option and weigh it or find out cursory details and decide?

You must have read lot of history and geography. How many times did you think about the times described, about the people, the kind of lives they led and their knowledge? not many of us do that. Every news that we come across has something to think about. But we don't. Why none of us thinks about why all of us want to know so much about how celebrities live and their love and career? What does that information give us except some entertainment for few minutes? But we don't think. We don't think about how to use our time effectively.

Do we think about what our political leaders say? Do we think about why we are looking for a date? Do we think about why our relationship is breaking? We pretend to think. But we don't normally carry out any analysis. Sloppy thinking leads us nowhere. It produces bad results. To think means - to try and understand every aspect of the given problem, its past and what the future may entail.

What kind of thinker are you? Why not find out with some fun quizzes about your personality. They will surely make you think.

Test Your Impatience

Patience is said to be a great virtue. How many of us are patient? For example, you need immediate medical attention and you reach your Doctor after calling him/her up. You find that you will have to wait for one hour. What would be your reaction/ would you take a magazine and begin reading or walk around impatiently?

All of us lose our patience at some point of time in our life. Some of us do it very quickly. For others it needs something big to disturb otherwise they are patient all the times. What is your patience? Have you thought about it? Certain ties in life, we can do nothing, but we still act impatiently. That does not help at all. It may hurt us.

What if you are stuck in a traffic jam? You want to reach for a meeting, but the traffic refuses to move because of some mishap ahead. Will acting impatiently help? No. it would be better to get cool and listen to some music or make notes of your work or plan of other things. Take this time as a gift and use it positively. This depends on us.

Success comes easily to those who understand their emotions and don’t let the emotions overwhelm them always. One who is always driven by emotions meets failures from time to time. We have to apply our mind and analyze every situation. We have to react after that. We have been given the ability to react by nature. Touch any hot object and you will get away immediately. That is natural. But reacting immediately in every situation can be bad for our career and home life. Patience plays a very important role in that.

Are You A Time User Or A Time Waster?

If you are like me, you’ve often wished there were 48 hours in a day instead of just 24. There never seems to be enough time to get everything done that you want. Since we just have about 16 hours a day not counting sleep time, it’s important how we use the time we have.

On the average, people waste about 2 hours a day. This is mainly from poor planning. If a person is unorganized, they waste time trying to find things, they miss appointments, they only do one thing at a time when they could be doing two.

Good time management is a major building block to success. Oftentimes, it’s not how much time we spend working but how efficiently we do the work. The key to successful time management is careful planning and setting priorities.

Plan your day, your week, and your month in advance. Know when things need to be done. A great way to “buy time” is to multi-task. Do more than one thing at a time. There are many things that do not require concentrated mental effort. These are more easily combined.

“Failing to plan is planning to fail,”

- unknown

Even though I am a big pro football fan, I can’t justify sitting down and spending three hours watching a game. I have to be doing other things while I do it. Thank goodness for instant replay! I’ve found this is a good time to spend icing injuries or some other busy work. I can also record the games and watch them while exercising. I exercise about 30 minutes a day so during the football season I can watch a game during the week without wasting any time doing it.

When you run errands try to do as many as you can on one trip. If you are self-employed, you can combine personal errands that are on the way to a business errand and have the mileage written off as a business expense.

I’ve been fortunate to have been able to work at home for the past ten years. It’s been great because I hate to waste time commuting. If you must commute, you can use the time to listen to audio self-improvement tapes, audio books or anything educational.

If you are a regular exerciser and belong to a gym, think about working out at home. If you lack the space and money for exercise equipment, try traditional body weight exercises. A little research on the Internet can show you websites devoted to this subject. Even though I lifted weights for 20 years, I’ve converted to body weight exercises. I’ve found they feel better and get the same if not better results. Of course, if you go to the gym to socialize or network, that’s okay. You’re doing more than one thing at a time. You can go walking with your wife. That way you’re getting exercise and husband / wife interaction at the same time.

Setting priorities enables you to get the most important things done. Keep you eye on the big picture. Don’t let low priority things bump off the higher priority tasks from your schedule. If you’ve only got so much time, it’s imperative you spend your time doing the things that bring you the most benefit.

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

– Goethe

Time is so precious. If you want to be successful in life you need to be spending more time being productive and doing things that are moving you forward. Spending hours a day watching TV, playing computer games, or surfing the Internet is not productive time usage. We all need downtime but you need to determine how much is really necessary. If you use your productive time efficiently then you will have more time to relax and do the fun things.