Why time is not on your side.

Time is not on your side, and it can be!

Do you ever wonder why time isn’t on your side and it feels like it gets away from you?

Have you looked at the time and thought “gee, I thought I had more time” or “where did the time go?

There are a lot of reasons for this. One that I wanted to talk about today is that things often take way more time than you think they will.

Something you think will take you five minutes actually takes you three times that amount. And that means the other things you planned on doing, can’t be done.

Getting things done, actually takes longer than you plan.

Recently I was registering for CPR training on the American Red Cross site. I thought it would take me five minutes, it took me 20 minutes to complete.

I was so surprised at how long it took after I completed my task I went back and documented the exact steps I took in order to see why it took that long.

It took me about 21 steps to actually complete registering.

In a nutshell, the website is not set up to retrieve data effectively. It took me several narrowed searches to finally find what I wanted.

I could not check out easily. Because I had an account I had to log in. To which, it told me my password was incorrect and I needed to reset it. That took longer than expected and I had to open my email to retrieve that data.

Thankfully though the site did hold the info I had filled in when I began this journey – yes it has been a journey. 

I began this adventure at 12:55 and I finally ended it at 1:15. Really? 20 minutes?

It took a lot of steps, some that I thought were annoyingly long. It’s definitely not the three licks to the Tootsie Pop!

And so this is one of the reasons that time is not on your side.

When planning, make sure to add two to three times the amount you think it should take.

And because things always take longer, this is why we feel we never have enough time.

If we keep in mind that things will take longer than we:

1. believe it will take
2. think it will take and
3. want it to take

We’ll be getting things done in the appropriate time frame and keeping ourselves out of frustration and overwhelm.

One of my early mentors used to tell me to not only double the time you think it will take, but triple it.

I was completely freaked out when she told me that. YET, she is so right. When you do, you have allocated the right time to get the work accomplished and you don’t have to freak out because “oh no I’m running out time” – it just doesn’t happen and often what will happen is
that you’ll very happily have more time on your hands and isn’t that a wonderful thing?!

I think so.

If you struggle with losing time, I’m happy to help.

I offer a free 30 minute Design Your Success with Purpose session. I work with business owners to elevate themselves in order to excel at organizing their thoughts, to-dos and things to accomplish what they set out to do with great confidence and competence. In this session, you’ll get clear on all that you are doing and allocate your time appropriately so that you never feel that times gets away from you again. Schedule your free 30 minute session now.