I have always had a love/hate relationship with time. Well, more of a hate relationship. You see, there are a few things you need to know about time.

  1. Time is always consistent. Time runs, as they say, like clockwork. It keeps going and doesn’t wait for anyone or anything. The sun rises, the sun sets. Every day. It will continue to do so whether you like it or not. Or, to paraphrase my fellow University of Dayton Alum Dan Patrick, “You can’t stop time; you can only hope to contain it.” 
  2. Time is always right. Time is always on time. It is you who decides whether you are early or late. Whether you decide to use it for constructive purposes or totally waste it. The choice is yours. You can never blame time because it is always right. 
  3. You only have a finite amount of it. The problem is when you are born you don’t know how much you have of it. You can have a little of it, a reasonable amount of it, or you can have a lot of it. We all expect to have a lot of it, but you just don’t know. 
  4. You can do what you want with it. There is a calendar called the Weeks of My Life which encompasses all the weeks of your life from 1 to 100. You darken each box after you finish a week. It’s a visual representation of how much time you’ve got left. If you are young, you can see you’ve got a lot of time. If you are older like me, you are running out of it (probably why I don’t own that calendar). 
  5. You can’t turn back time. When we played street games in Brooklyn, sometimes you would ask for a “do-over.” Another word for that would be a replay. You can’t do that with time. Once time is over, you can’t get it back. The only real “do-over” you can get is in the future, and you’ll have to use more time.

And that brings me to the crux of the situation: with time, we have deadlines. We all have them. Be at work/school on time, have that project/homework done on time, be at that meeting on time, pay your bills on time, etc. If you don’t, there will certainly be consequences. And usually those consequences won’t be good ones. Miss a credit card payment and see what happens. If you can keep those bad deadlines in check, you’ll be doing alright.

Where you can make a major impact is setting deadlines for yourself that will get you where you want to be. So often, we are worried about deadlines others set for us that we tend to forget what we want to accomplish. You know what the biggest excuse for not reaching our goals is? We don’t have the time.

My hope for you is that you take a good, strong look at your day and see where you are leaking time. If you are doing things that are not Moving You Forward toward your goals, ask yourself why are you doing them. My best example is when I became a Dad. My buddies would call me to come play golf. When you think about it, a round of golf all-inclusive takes 5-7 hours out of your day. I easily decided that time was better spent with my kids on a Saturday than hitting a little white ball around.

Remember the calendar Weeks of My Life. It’s your time. You decide.

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