The Reason You Struggle With Time
Last night, I was doing the normal after-work dinner hustle. I had food cooking on the stovetop and salad ingredients on the counter, and at the same time I was also trying to unload the dishwasher, entertain the baby, answer philosophical (“WHY”) questions from my 5 year old, and keep my toddler out of trouble. I was sweating, cursing my husband’s job that was keeping him late, and wishing that I had opted for take-out instead.
The most stressful part of this whole routine, aside from the physical strength it took, was the time. I was constantly checking the clock on the wall. The baby only has a finite window of wakefulness before his unusually early bedtime and I knew that if dinner took too long, I would be dealing with cranky kids and non-stop requests for snacks, which defeats the purpose of cooking altogether.
Well, fast forward 15 minutes and the food was finally ready, the table was set, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I called the big kids over to the table - “Dinner’s ready!”
My 5 year-old replied, “Mom, how was dinner ready so fast?”
Time Just Is
Funny how two people in the same situation can have two TOTALLY DIFFERENT feelings about time.
That’s because time just is.
Time is just a unit of measure. It’s how we measure our hours, our days, our weeks.
How and what we THINK about time is what gives us our feelings or perceptions of time.
The Enemy of Working Moms
Almost every working mom that I talk to is dealing with an issue that comes back to time. I constantly hear things like…
I’m always rushing.
I don’t have any time for myself.
I wish I had more time with my family.
How do I get it all done?
I am so overwhelmed.
They blame time for their problems. They don’t have enough of it. It goes by too quickly during the weekends and too slowly during the weekday.
But like I said earlier, time is just a unit of measure. It’s what you do within your time and how you think about the time that you have, that causes you to feel overwhelmed, busy, and like you never have ENOUGH.
Life-Changing Realization
I still remember this life-changing statement my coach said to me several years ago -
You are choosing to feel overwhelmed
How dare she accuse me of that? I hated feeling constantly overwhelmed. It felt terrible. It wasn’t my choice to have so much to do and so little time in which to do it. Why on earth would I choose to feel this way?
It took me almost a year to work through what she was trying to teach me. And now, I believe her. It’s true.
Time isn’t to blame for how we feel. We are.
We are the ones who choose what we do and how we think about it or approach it.
So if you’re feeling busy, it’s time to question whether you’re expecting too much of your time.
If you feel like you don’t have any time for yourself, it’s time to make a plan for your time and schedule your priorities.
If you feel like you don’t have enough quality time with your family, it’s time to stop looking at the clock and thinking about what else you should be doing with your time.
And if you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s time to start trusting that everything that was supposed to get done, got done. And everything else will in it’s own time. If it’s important to you, you’ll schedule it.
Learning to Appreciate It
Remember, time is not to blame. And neither are you. You’re just learning how to better appreciate your time, honor your priorities, and schedule the rest.