7 Reasons You Don’t Have Time

Welcome to Tuesday’s Tips at Ask Dr. Darcy. Here are the 9 most common reasons why you don’t have time. Change these habits and you’ll change your life. Because that’s what the quality of our life comes down to: Do your daily habits serve you? If they do, you’re successful. If they don’t, you’re not. Success is nothing more than good habits repeated daily. Failure is nothing more than poor habits repeated daily. 

1. You say, “I don’t have time,” and because of that, you don’t make time. Time is the universal equalizer-we all have the exact same amount. You’re certainly not the busiest person on the planet. Stop bullshitting yourself (and others) and commit to removing the phrase from your vocabulary. I haven’t used that sentence since 09. Since then, my productivity has been off the charts.

2. You’re a communication whore. You keep your phone ON, jumping every time you receive a text, call, email or Twitter update. And you wonder why you can’t get things done? Productive people turn their phones off except during specific times of their choosing. YOU need to decide when you’ll be on the phone. Stop being other people’s bitch.

3. You haven’t created a system for being held accountable. You need an Action Partner – someone who you’ll commit to completing a certain action, and to whom you’ll report back at a specific time and give an update. My clients use Action Partners daily. And they get shit done.

4. You tell yourself great stories that minimize the importance of completing a task – and you buy it. You look at the mail and tell yourself that there isn’t enough time to open it all and that you’ll do it later, tomorrow, after, etc. Stop having monologues and start having dialogues. Talk back. A part of you knows you’re making excuses. Give that part a voice and let her chime in!

5. You overcommit. You’re an accommodator and you don’t know how to say NO. Look at this month’s calendar, identify those activities that don’t serve you, and get out of them for next month.

6. You don’t use a calendar. Not the right way. If you use one, you probably have more than one so no single calendar has all of your commitments. Or you use a silly old-school one (paper and pen) and you forget it at home or in the car. Or you have a perfectly organized Google Calendar that you don’t look at throughout day, which is the functional equivalent of sailing with a compass that you don’t look at. Get on Google Calendar, enter everything you need to do (and specific times), look at it at least three times a day, most importantly when you wake up and before you go to bed.

7. You blow yourself off. You keep the commitments that you make with other people, but when it comes to you, everything’s optional. Start treating yourself the way you’d expect others to. When you look at your calendar and see “Find a Therapist” at 4:00 today, stop whatever you’re doing at 3:58, and Google “find a therapist.” The appointments you have with yourself are no different from the ones you have with others. Don’t be a flake!