Why You Should Stop Managing Your Time Today

#TimeManagement #Time #legacy #leadership #reframing

You own your business. Maybe it's a small business, but you own it.

You own your house. Maybe it's a money pit, but it's yours.

You own a car or two, or even three cars, (and if you're like me and you have multiple teenage drivers, maybe none of them are fancy).

You own a bicycle, or an R.V., or a boat. Or a hunting bow, or a basketball. Whatever your hobbies are, you own the stuff you use. You don't rent that stuff. That wouldn't make sense.

But you "manage" your time? Wait. Hold on a second. Why don't you own your time?

Is it semantics? No. There's a huge need for a reframing, a paradigm shift. When you manage something, the implication is that someone else owns it. The implication of time management is that if you take good care of the shop you can go home at the end of the day and do what you want to do-- after you did all the stuff someone else wanted.

For those who are not business owners, who are employed, let me tell you a secret about employment. You're expendable. I've been employed and under the illusion that nobody could do the job as well as I could, which was just me being cocky in my twenties. Sure, I was good, but then, I was replaceable, too. They didn't fire me, but there came a time when it was time to leave. That was early in 2009, which was a terrible time to leave a job. This is a lesson we learned again a few years ago during Covid, but employment is so darn comfortable I'm sure there are people who are already forgetting just how tenuous their career can be whenever it's staked on a job. There's nothing wrong with jobs, just with forgetting how easily you can be replaced. The good news is, you can also replace someone else. If you need to leave, leave. Toxic environment? Get out. I did that once, too. I stuck it out for six months. It's the only time in my adulthood that I didn't sleep well. Forget it. Next time, I'm out even quicker.

Life is too short to treat your time as something to "manage." Own your time, don't rent it from someone else, only to get scraps of it when the day is done and you're exhausted. Don't let people abuse it. I'm not saying don't be employed. Make sure that job works for you, as the owner of your time.

If you are a business owner, this should be easier, not harder. But here's another secret: it usually isn't. There are tools and systems available to help you make this paradigm shift from thinking about time as something you have to manage instead of something you control. Own it. Take leadership. If that feels impossible, contact me and I'll help you. I'll be worth every penny.

On a similar note, but probably deserving of an additional blog, the same goes for "Work/Life Balance". People who own their time don't do "balance." They do work/life integration (note: that's from the same root word as "integrity"). Everything is interconnected. Balance implies an exhausting hopping back and forth from one end to the other end of a teeter-totter. I don't know about you, but that's not for me!

If it isn't working for you, make a change, because you do own your time. You don't know your expiration date, but until then, you have an integral legacy to build. So stop managing your time today, and start owning it.