Do you love what you do for a living? Do you make good impact on people while making good money?

Time is the great equalizer. Everybody gets the same amount: 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour. We can’t save time or accumulate or rearrange it. We can’t turn it off or on. It can’t be replaced.

But these days, it seems as if the lament of not having enough time has become a national anthem. Everywhere people find themselves constantly in a rush, over-booked and over-scheduled with no time off. Life is accompanied by the ongoing stress of not enough time. And sometimes doing too much and being too busy can be a way of numbing feelings or disguising depression or anger.

Though it may not always seem so, how we fill our time and how we spend it is our choice. Answer the following questions to discover if you’re caught up in the “too-busy” cycle.

QUIZ

1. I constantly find myself doing “urgent” things and trying to catch up.
2. I allow myself to drift into obligations when I don’t know how much time or energy they’ll require.
3. I find myself running from when I get up in the morning until I go to bed at night. I’m always tired and never feel like I accomplished enough.
4. I seldom schedule a day off for myself and when I do, I tend to fill it with activities.
5. I don’t make time for “self-care” activities: physical exercise, nurturing or “pampering” myself, cultural stimulation, spiritual well-being, learning something new, playing, or simply doing nothing.
6. I seldom have time to do the things I really love.
7. My work and project areas are cluttered with “I’ll look at this later” stacks and “to-do” piles.
8. I often miscalculate how long certain activities will take.
9. I often miss deadlines or work long hours to meet a deadline.
10. I respond to interruptions such as phone calls, faxes, email, beepers and pagers, and allow them to take me off track.
11. I try to keep things in my head rather than making lists. If I do make a daily “to-do” list, it’s impossible to complete in a day.
12. I tend to move from one urgent thing to the next, rather than working toward specific goals and objectives.
13. I find myself constantly wishing I had more time or projecting an imaginary future when I have more time, making comments such as “as soon as…” or “next year…”
14. I spend time running errands and rushing because I didn’t plan well enough.
15. I spend time doing things I could pay someone else to do.
16. I often do things because I “should,” or continue to do things that no longer fit who I am.
17. Other people complain that my schedule doesn’t allow enough time for them.

Please circle the questions you answered YES. Grab your notebook to write down your action steps to change your daily habits. Use calendar to plan your time and energy. You can use google calendar to choose different colors for your activity to review how much time you spend on category A,B,C and how much time you spend on work, plan time, and play time.

Use 3 different colors or Category A,B,C to mark your schedule time as

A= Urgent and important to respond immediately such as your work deadline.

B=Urgent but not important to respond soon such as contact some persons.

C= Not urgent but important to plan ahead in your schedule such as self care habits.

Check your motivation to spend your time with. Do you always respond to others because of obligations, guilt or shame? Can you better manage your time to live a balanced life?