Happy New Year everyone. As we venture into 2013, I wanted to thank every single one of you who have followed, commented, shared or simply spent any of your precious time reading my blog in 2012. I’m truly grateful to you all. The aim of this blog is to subtly cajole, motivate, and challenge your mindset into chasing and achieving that goal or dream whatever it may be. Sometimes the subtlety works, other times it is delivered with a sledge hammer cracking a nut approach [intentionally]. Thank you for accepting it.

One of the most common pieces of feedback I receive when speaking to people about personal development and starting the path to achieving personal goals, is, “there isn’t enough time in the day”. This is especially true when the goal is a side project or idea alongside a day job. My response normally includes a quote I heard a few years ago, “We all get the same 24 hours”.  This is worth incanting whenever the excuse of time pops into our heads. We are all busy, life generally has a knack of getting in our way. We can go from being bored, seeking something [interesting] to do, to periods where we can’t seem to find a minute to ourselves. The periods of boredom are where we are avoiding what we REALLY should be doing, which is not too dissimilar to when we find ourselves overwhelmingly busy. If this busy phase continues for a while, we need to question what we are keeping ourselves from doing. Both the boredom and busy phases are excuses, we are very rarely busy ALL the time, every single moment of the day. A typical exercise to carry out if we feel we have no time is to keep a daily diary, for a minimum of one week. Simply jot down what we are doing every hour to start. This should be easy for the hours at work and travelling. What comes as a surprise to many are the leisure hours we spend watching tv, listening to music, chatting on the phone etc. What we imagine as an hour here or there, builds into 10 – 15 hours a week.  The follow-up challenge is, if we spend half of those hours working on that project, idea, goal, ThingyMaJig every week, how much of it would be completed in a month or even 3 months from now.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Albert Einstein

I wrote previously about the use of time in You have enough time. The better use of time, is how everyone who ever got started, chased their dream or achieved their goals made it happen. No rocket science, no luck and no miracle ‘born-with-it’ gift required, it all can be attributed with putting in the time.  The excuses are getting old, we all know it. We cannot keep telling ourselves the same old story. Last Year we planned to get it done, it did not happen, we don’t want to be repeating the same thing a year from now. Break the excuse cycle and reap the rewards.

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