The word “busy” seems to be one of the most used up words in recent history. When I ask someone how they are, the first word out of their mouth seems to be “busy”. Busy doesn’t seem adequate enough to describe the life of a single parent. Whether the busyness comes from poor time management or over committing yourself to others, the days seem to slip away with hardly anything to show for it.
As real as that passage of time seems, the reality is that everyone has 24 hours each and every day and most of those hours are not used effectively or efficiently. The excuse of “I don’t have enough time” is a lie. It’s a made up story that allows people to stay stuck where they are. How do I know?
Look at the facts:
If you are getting 8 hours of sleep each night, you still have 16 hours left over each day to do the things you need to do. That equals 112 hours a week of awake time that you can account for. Now, let’s remove, for example, 3 of those hours a day for things like cooking, eating, bathing and going to the bathroom/reading the paper. That still gives you 13 hours each day, or 91 hours per week.
Now, let’s take away 45 hours a week for work and commuting. You still have 46 hours left over. Remove another 7 hours (an hour each day) and set it aside for “Stuff” things like buying food, paying bills, walking the dog, and cleaning the house. You still have 39 unaccounted for hours each week. That is nearly 40 hours each and every week that you can’t account for.
If you still don’t believe you have that many unaccounted for hours each week, then go ahead and reduce that number by half (20 hours/7= pert near 3 hours a day to watch TV and surf the Internet). That is still nearly 20 unaccounted hours each week. Even if your “Internet” activity accounts for another 10 hours a week, you still have 10 hours each week that you can’t logically account for. Ten hours that you have no idea how you spend. Ten hours every week, in a year’s time, that is 520 hours, or 32.5 days that are unaccounted for.
How are you spending those 10 hours? Watching TV, playing games, surfing the net, feeling sorry for yourself? Carve out 30 minutes a day, give those minutes to your kids, and see how your relationship with them can change. I was telling my friend Lynette Patterson, who helped me put into words this concept, that I used my “found” hours to be a volunteer Coach for my kids. How will you use your hours?
Now go do what you have to do to…
Make it a super day,
Kevin
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