Why do I say I don’t have enough time to work on this project?

Why do I say I don’t have enough time to get the house project done?

Why do I say I don’t have enough time to work out?

The phrase “I don’t have enough time” is engrained in our mind as a default reason. In our pace of life that seems to continue to speed up, we are at times auto set to the answer of “I don’t have enough time.” There can be consequences with this response.

For many of us, if we look at the list of what we want to accomplish for the day, week, month, etc. I have a feeling “there’s not enough time” would be true. We all realize time won’t stop for any of us and with only so much time in the day, to cover everything we’d ever want to do isn’t feasible.

What if we took this automated response we sometimes have of “I don’t have enough time” and flip our mindset? Move from a blame mentality of not enough time to an opportunity to reflect on the approach to prioritizing to see if changes need to be made. It’s a subtle difference but a big impact on the mind playing the blame game vs. the accountability game.

Turn “I don’t have enough time” to “I didn’t prioritize getting this done”. 

Being spread too thin is unfortunately too common right now. We must accept we can’t do it all but can control our outlook and mindset on how we prioritize. We have a lot of ownership in this.

There will be times we aren’t happy with how we prioritized. Watching TV too long, scrolling through social media excessively, spending time on things we don’t value, and much more adds up to time we can’t prioritize on other important aspects of our lives. That’s normal and when we have a mindset acknowledging how we prioritized our day as opposed to placing blame on not having enough time, we open the door to understanding more about how we want to prioritize for the future.

There will always be a battle of what we should be doing with our time. If you flip the mindset from “I don’t have enough time” to reflecting and addressing how you prioritize, you will maximize your time so much more. Take back control of your time and how you prioritize.

Take your step: the next time you tell yourself “I don’t have enough time” take a moment to pause. Reflect on whether this is something that in the future should be prioritized. If you agree that it should be a priority to spend time on, pass on the blame game and instead play the accountability game of telling yourself you didn’t prioritize this. If you look at this as not a priority, great job not investing time in it and shift the self-talk from “I don’t have enough time” to “I don’t see this as a priority to spend time on”. Subtle differences but big impact going from blame game to accountability game.