“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Time. I think I’ve wasted 2/3’s of my life worrying about and fixing or trying to fix what other people think is urgent. I spent most of the last month thinking about who owns my time and the fact is, unless you’re paying for it - or I agree to donate it to a cause I think is important, I own my time. It’s mine. Yours is yours, mine is mine.

Growing up my parents believed that everything about me, my time, my money, my body, my thoughts - all of it - belonged to them. They were wrong. It’s taken me this long to be able to say definitively that MY time is MINE, but I think I still have a few years left to enjoy that. If not years, then whatever God has given me is now mine. In reaching this point I learned a few time management secrets the “experts” don’t usually share:

Determine WHO Owns Your Time.
Sit down and honestly examine who you BELIEVE owns your time. Is it yours? or are you giving it away to friends, family, work without realizing that it is YOURS to give and to allocate. So many of us feel guilty, like we “owe” people, work, family, kids, volunteer causes so much time. Unless they’re paying for it - you owe NO ONE your time. Hold on - I’ll get to who, what, when, where and why in a minute. But for now, really look at who just takes your time without asking, who assumes you have time to give, who is claiming ownership of your time?

Create a Time Budget.
Take a month and track your time just like you’d track your money. Where is it going and what is it going towards? Are you watching 2 hours of television a day? That’s 60 hours - a week and a half of work - per month. Wow! I watch at least that much video - movies mostly, or YouTube a day. I could do a lot with that 60 to 100 hours a month. Couldn’t you? Where else is your time going? How much time do you spend answering emails? Chatting with friends? Shopping? Cleaning? Sleeping? None of those are bad. It’s just a matter of noting where your time goes.

What Are Your Goals?
List your goals. Where do you want to be in a year? I want to be back on the road full-time in a new van. I want to learn to sew and quilt better. I want to lose weight. I want to sort through all my “stuff” and get rid of things I’m not using. I want to go fishing on a guided tour and learn to fly fish. I have a whole list of things I want to do this year. Doing them takes time and money. It takes time to earn that money. It takes time to go to the gym, work out, clean, sew, take lessons etc. Which leads me to the next point:

How Much Time Do You Have to Accomplish Your Goal(s)?
One year = 8,760 hours. 2,920 are spent sleeping if you sleep 8 hours a day. If you only spend 1 hour a day showering, brushing your teeth, shaving, dressing and using the bathroom you’ve burned up another 365 hours. How about commuting to work, school, dinner, the grocery store, the mall and around town. A conservative estimate is 1 hour there too. Another 365 hours. Eating? Another hour a day - 20 minutes for each meal - even if that meal is a cup of coffee or a muffin at the snack machine. Sit-downs, going out to dinner are more, but I’m looking at the minimum. 365 for eating. So far the hours in a year taken up with just existing are: 4,015. If you work 40 hours a week at a regular job, that’s 2,080 hours gone. That leaves you with 1,935 hours. Out of those hours are shopping, waiting in line, traveling, sex, dating, time with your spouse and kids, oh - and the gym. That’s about 37 hours a week or 5. 3 hours a day, 7 days a week. Take a nap, get lost going somewhere, vacation, a haircut, a movie once a week and you’ll burn through your “free time” pretty fast. Scary isn’t it? All of a sudden you’re starting to see why who owns your time is important. If you have a mother-in-law, neighbors, bridge club, needy neighbors, a co-worker who needs a therapist but bends your ear a couple of hours a week (104 hours a year) instead, a brother or sister who needs your help for a few hours a week or a month…doesn’t take much until everyone else’s needs are eating into your sleep time, your self-care time. And then what happens? You get sick? Can you hear the clock ticking? I sure can.

NOW we can talk time management. It’s not about keeping a calendar or Daytimer or whatever. It’s about understanding that you really do own your time and it’s up to you to decide where to spend or invest it.

Part of controlling your finances is having a financial budget. You know how much money you have coming in, and how much is going out. You make decisions about what you’ll spend and where based on your priorities, goals and needs. You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time. It’s fixed. You have a finite amount of it. So how are you going to manage it? Once it’s gone, you can’t make it back up. It’s gone. So it’s more important to decide how you want to manage it. Can you afford to hire someone to do your shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, housekeeping and car maintenance? Would you rather have $400 or 40 hours? Which do you value more? Time of course. If you maximize your time you can make more money allowing you to buy more time to do things you want to do - like vacation with family and loved ones, or volunteer, or travel.

So many of us think, “It’s only a $2 cup of coffee a day.” But in a year that’s $500 if you only buy 250 cups of coffee. If you’re saving for a new car or computer or iPad you could make your own coffee, or give it up completely and be $400 to $500 ahead. I spend $10 a week on soda = $40 a month or $480 a year. If I give that and some other stuff up I could afford to eat healthier and to afford a down payment on that new van. If I give up Netflix ($120 a year) and soda ($480 a year) and a few other unnecessary items I could save $2,000 a year and get back 800 hours a year in which to write, produce and sell books or find other client’s whose projects could net me more money - enough to buy the van and take that trip I want.

Next Step: Set your Priorities and Allocate Your Time Accordingly.
The whole reason to have goals is so when you have to make a decision you have criteria for determining whether to say yes or no. If I have a goal of losing 100 pounds and someone offers me cake and doughnuts I can say, “hmmm.. my goal is to lose 100 pounds. Will this help me reach my goal? NO!!” so I can make a wise decision. If a friend asks me to join them for dinner and one of my goals is spending more time with friends then I can say yes. If they want me to take a week off and help them paint their house, not likely to happen. I might spend a few hours if they’re a good friend, but no - 40 hours painting a house isn’t going to get me closer to any of my other goals unless there’s a trade-off or $$ involved for that amount of time. If your goal is to “make more money” then time is critical. You can waste a month a year just watching television, chatting, hanging out and doing ‘fun’ stuff that doesn’t advance your life, your business or your goals. It’s really up to you to decide. YOU own your time. Make conscious decisions about who gets it and why.

See where this is going? Now, imagine you feel guilty for not spending time with your unemployed friend, or sister, or brother. How much time are you willing to give them? If you aren’t budgeting your time you’ll probably give them way more than you want to and feel resentful for it.

It’s not wrong to own your time and to decide how to spend or invest it. Only you can determine where it needs to go and why. All I’m saying is take a few hours and think about where it’s going, who owns it and who determines where it’s spent. If your kids and family are important, set an amount of time to spend and don’t let work, or anything else steal that time from you. If your work is important, don’t let partying roommates, family drama, or other things steal time away from that. The places you are losing time may shock you. It did me! But it’s not too late to change it.

Want more? My friend Ami had an AWESOME post about time and priorities that I didn’t read until after I wrote this one. She talks about taking a hard look at your “Identified Priorities.” Excellent post. Check it out here!