Where Do You Find The Time

Hi 

How are your New Year's Resolutions going?

Did you write them down? Have you been making progress on them?

When I go through my resolutions, I usually go through the process of reflecting on my previous year and realigning my performance with my long-term goals.

The creation of my annual goals usually happens in 3 phases, first reflection, second recapping and third realigning. I always make my resolutions based on my progress in achieving my long term goals.

More on this in a little later...

Anyway...

While coaching my business and branding clients, I often find that they often neglect 2 very important factors when deciding on their annual goals...

Firstly, they often jump to creating their goals without considering their impact on their long term goals and vice versa. 

Secondly, they create new goals without creating systems that will allow them to have the time to achieve those goals.

Let's be honest here, we're all adults. We enter each year, each month and each week knowing exactly how we're going to spend our time. We divide our time amongst our jobs, our friends and our families.

Somewhere between all the demands that we have on our time, we have to find the time to take care of ourselves, our bodies and our minds (we often squeeze it in somewhere during the weekends). 

So how do we plan to achieve these goals if we don't take any practical steps to create time for them? 

I've touched on the concept of an Ideal Day before, we can use it to see how we would like our lives to be in the next 12-18 months.

But, the ideal day concept can also be used to make changes in the short term. It can be used to give direction to our daily lives so that we can find the time for the important things (this is used to improve your current life, these are changes that you'd like to see in the next week or so). 

This is how it works:

1. Make a list of your current daily activities with their number of hours each activity requires:

• Breakfast with my husband (30 Minutes)
• Bible Time (1 Hour)
• Work (6 Hours)
• Cooking (2 Hours)
• Evening TV with Hubby (2 hours)

2. Make a list of the things that you would like to find time for every day:

• Waking up early 
• Exercise (30-45 Minutes)
• Cleaning the house (1 hour)
• Working on my long term goals 

3. When you add the hours together, they shouldn't exceed 16 hours. On average, you should sleep for 8 hours, since this is an ideal day exercise, let's keep it this way. Now map out how you would ideally like to spend your 16 hours of the day, don't forget to make allowances for commutes to and from work:

5:00 - Wake Up

5:15 - 6:00: Exercise  

6:00 - 7:00: Wash and get ready 

7:00 - 7:30: Breakfast with Hubby

7:30 - 8:00: Clean the house a little

8:00 - 9:00: Bible Time 

9:00 - 12:30: Work 

12:30 - 13:30: Cook and Eat Lunch

14:00 - 17:00: Work

17:00 - 18:00: Working on my long-term goals

18:00 - 19:30: Cook

19:30 - 21:30: Eat and Bond with Hubby

Ideally, this is how I'd like to live my current life. This is something that I should print out and put up on the wall. This should be something that you should use to guide your daily activity.

The point of your Ideal Day is to give you direction. You should wake up and try to live out your ideal day every day and. if you fail on Monday, you wake up and you try again on Tuesday.

And sure, there will be unexpected events, but when that happens, move things around or try again the next day.

If you could successfully live out your ideal day 3 times a week, then you'll have 3 hours a week, every week to work on your long term goals. 3-5 hours a week is all you need to change your life.

A year from today, you could be living the life you've always dreamt of. Yes, it takes a little discipline and yes it requires a little work but it's definitely possible and it's worth it! 

This is how people find the time to build 6 figure businesses while they work their 9-to-5. 

I like the fact that we've created a system to assess and correct your time habits in the new Her Success Journal.

It's a 90-day guided action journal to help you navigate through your first 90-days in business.

For more information, head over to our website www.hersuccessjournal.com