Week Nineteen: Rules of Time Management

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Time management is a subject that many women struggle with. In the Remodel Your Reality program, there are four rules to effective and empowering time management: Be Authentic, Place Yourself on Your List, Know Your Own Worth, and Say Goodbye to Takers.

One Thing To Think About

You will succeed or fail at time management based on your willingness to consistently invest your time in support of the priorities you’ve established. This becomes possible when you remove requests and commitments that fall outside of your priority structure. In short, this means you’re going to have to get very good at saying the dreaded “n” word—no.

One Question To Answer

Do you have trouble saying no to others? Due to the desire to avoid disappointing others and their aversion to feeling uncomfortable, many women do. To preserve your time for things that matter to you, you must be willing to experience temporary discomfort. This requires dedication to the focused management of your schedule and calls for you to develop the courage to risk upsetting or disappointing others.

One Challenge To Take

Integrate the Four Rules of Time Management into your daily life. Use them as a guide star to give you direction and keep you on the track you want to take.

• Be Authentic – Your priority list must reflect what you authentically hold in esteem versus what you believe should be important to you. Be honest when creating your priority blueprint. It can serve you, acting as a compass to support you in making decisions about where to invest your time and energy. If you don’t define your list based on your truth, you will be living someone else’s. I know you don’t want that reality or you wouldn’t be reading this book. Creating a list based on what you believe is expected of you, or out of fear about what others might think of you, is a recipe for stress and failure.
• Place Yourself on Your List – When you commit to taking care of yourself, you become more powerfully able to take care of everyone else in your life. While you may feel an initial resistance to placing yourself on your own list, believing it would be selfish to do so, I strongly encourage you to invest in taking care of you. When you do, you will be able to give more to every area of your life. I challenge you to take care of yourself at least as well as you take care of everyone else!
• Know Your Own Worth – If you don’t believe you’re worthy of acceptance and friendship, you will try to earn your way into both. The fear of unworthiness is at the root of many unproductive behaviors, such as accepting invitations you aren’t interested in, agreeing to requests that don’t compliment your priorities, and taking on responsibilities that detract from your own well-being. The disease to please may not kill you, but it will significantly detract from the quality of your life.
• Say Goodbye to Takers – If you’ve been living as a pleaser, there are undoubtedly takers around you. A taker is a person who uses your time, energy, money, and resources without giving anything back in return. I liken these individuals to parasites, and they will begin to disappear when you start saying no. Make a commitment to stand your ground and invest yourself in only those requests that meet your priorities or interest you. Prepare yourself in advance to decline invitations or requests that don’t. Anticipate the inevitable shedding of the takers in your life and celebrate the opening you’re creating for a higher quality of person to enter in their place.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Week Eighteen: Manage Your Calendar

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Now that you’ve identified the priorities you’d like to invest in, it’s important to evaluate how you’re currently spending your time.

One Thing To Think About

The potential to experience joy, satisfaction, and happiness lives in your calendar. If your calendar does not reflect the priorities you’ve defined for yourself, it will be necessary for you to make some changes in order to create room in your schedule. In doing so, you will begin to experience more of what matters to you when you schedule less of what doesn’t.

One Question To Answer

Open your calendar and look at the commitments you’ve made for the next two weeks. How many of your commitments support the priorities you just established? How many do not?

If you’re spending more than half of your time catering to the demands of others, doing things because you think you should do them, or making commitments because you aren’t comfortable declining, it’s quite likely you’re unbalanced, overwhelmed, resentful, and unfulfilled at the end of most days.

It’s time to change that! You can support the people in your life, fulfill your responsibilities, make time for things that are important to you, and create a sense of balance in your life.

One Challenge To Take

1. Track your activities for one week. Compared your personal and professional priorities against your activities. How many of your priorities have made it onto your schedule? How many items on your schedule have nothing to do with your priorities? How many activities actually serve to defeat or oppose your priorities?
2. Make a list of all of your current commitments and evaluate how they either support or detract from your ability to live within your priority framework. (We’ll talk more about evaluating opportunities in another post.)
3. Make a commitment to get free of commitments and activities that do not support your priorities. Decide what activities and commitments you’re going to remove, then create a plan to move them out of your calendar. Create a script for talking to other people around these issues, if it helps. Chose the first item to go and TAKE ACTION!

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Week Seventeen: Define Your Priorities

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Now that you’ve started to reclaim your energy, it’s time to decide how you’re going to use it. Over the next few posts, I’d like to challenge you to stop managing your time. Instead, I’d like you to consider managing your priorities.

A priority is something that is important to you, or something that needs your attention in the present. Your personal priorities define how you invest time within your life. Your professional priorities guide your allocation of the time committed to your work.

Making the decision to invest your time according to your priorities not only supports the effective use of each moment, it also paves the road to a high-quality life. It creates a structure for you to make decisions that help you experience life on your terms and gives you permission to turn away from requirements that don’t support your aspirations.

One Thing To Think About

It’s easier to use your time effectively when you begin to view it as a finite commodity that you have the choice to spend—or invest. Establishing a list of priorities for your life and work, and making commitments based on that list, allows the things that are important to you to exist in your life.

One Question To Answer

At the end of each week, do you feel exhausted, frustrated, and burnt-out? Do you sometimes wonder why you can’t seem to get control and question what is wrong with you? If so, you have not proactively decided how you’d like to use your time, and it’s possible that a good deal of your day is committed to other people’s demands, to items that seem urgent, or in response to what you believe is expected of you. If you’ve taken this approach to managing your calendar, you probably have very little time left over to invest in what matters to you.

One Challenge To Take

Set aside twenty to thirty minutes to move through this activity. Try to arrange for an uninterrupted period of time, which allows you to consider the areas of your life and work that are truly important to you.

Create a list that reflects who you are, not a list that reflects what you think other people expect of you. Some examples include:

• Personal Priorities: Spending quality time with my family, taking time out for fun and recreation, taking care of my health.
• Professional Priorities: Leading and mentoring my employees, developing new business, continuing to learn and grow my skill base.

When you make the choice to honestly define what matters to you, the possibility for life and work balance is created. It’s quite likely that your schedule will remain full, even after moving through this exercise. The difference is that you will be busy with things that matter to you. You’ll be living your priorities. As a result, you’ll have the opportunity to experience a much greater level of joy, satisfaction, and happiness each day.

Until next time, take care!

Kim