Do you have lots of grand goals you would like to achieve someday? Do you tell yourself that someday, when life is a little less hectic, you will make time for the things that really matter?
It is easy to think that someday, we will actually make time for our priorities. Someday, we will prioritize prayer and Bible time, someday we will take a really special trip with our spouse, or someday, we will do the big and memorable things with our kids that we only dream about.
It is easy to push our true priorities to the wayside because daily life is just so busy. But the truth is, there will always be things that will effortlessly fill up our days and often, they will have very little to do with our actual priorities. We can always find ways to be busy, but whatever we are busy with is not always that important.
Life is busy, and it is common for the days to feel hectic, and for life to feel so full of the urgent that there is no time for the things that matter most. This can happen to anyone, but if we want it to change, we really need to be intentional. Here are a few ideas that can help:
1: Start Today.
Rather than feeling guilty about past mistakes, know that now is the time to make a change and to get back on track. Take time today to stop and reflect about what your most important priorities really are, and how you can prevent the busyness of life from pushing these things to the backburner. Life as a parent flies by at an alarming rate. Don’t wait to become the person you really want to be.
2: Write Down Your Goals.
Until we think through our goals enough to be able to write them down, they can remain vague and amorphous. Writing down our goals can help us to know what makes the cut and what does not. There will be lots of things that we might like to do someday if we can find the time, but what are the things that we are going to make the time for no matter what. If you want to make progress on your goals, you need to really reflect on the person you are and the person you are becoming. Writing down goals helps to make them concrete and measurable. You will be able to see at a glance both your long term goals as well as your short term goals. You will be able to see whether or not you are making progress.
3: Don’t Be a Perfectionist
Life is not about sitting down and figuring out a way to come up with a perfect system for perfect days for the rest of our life. Perfectionism can paralyze us so that we are afraid to even start working toward our goals. Life is about making progress, and enjoying the process. It is about growing and adapting while still keeping our priorities at the forefront. It is possible to focus too much on the perfect achievement of our goals, rather than progress, which is often gradual and sometimes even unnoticeable at the time. If we focus on perfection rather than enjoying the process of change and growth there is a good chance that we will give up in frustration. The daily progress of growing and becoming who we want to be can be wonderfully enjoyable and rewarding if we take the time to notice it. Don’t let perfectionism steal your progress and your enjoyment of it.
4: Start Small and Build.
One temptation we can have when we are really motivated about our goals, is to start with something grand and seemingly life changing. Maybe we receive some inspiration from something that we read or listen to, and we are inspired to make big changes in our lives for the better. And so we start out on Monday, with a plan to rework all of our systems and routines, to replace all our bad habits with good ones, and overall, to give ourselves a life makeover. The problem with this, is that halfway through the week, we are burnt out, frustrated, and disillusioned. The changes we tried to implement didn’t go as we had planned and instead of changing anything, we are right back to where we started. Luckily it doesn’t have to be this way. We really can make positive changes in our lives, from our thinking to our daily habits of life and health. Unfortunately, this probably won’t look as grand as a huge life makeover. It will be the small and gradual replacing of bad habits with good and replacing bad thinking with good thinking. It doesn’t look like much at the time, and to us the change can seem horribly slow and even imperceptible at times, but in the day to day, commit to making tiny steps toward our goals, or cultivate tiny habits that will make a big impact on our days. Tiny, good habits will have a big impact over time, and so will tiny bad habits, so choose carefully, and focus on these.
5: Be Consistent.
Along the same lines as starting small and building, it is more important to be faithful and consistent with focusing on one small habit, than to try several at once, and fall off the bandwagon. Consistency is key if we really want to see results. The faithful performance of even just one good habit (especially that of our thinking) done consistently over time, can truly be life changing.
Conclusion:
If we are not intentional about considering how we want to spend our time, the time willgo by anyway. If we are not careful to put our priorities first, we will be busy, but we will wonder where the time went. Daily life is busy enough that it can seem like there is no time to work on our goals, and so if something is truly important to you it must be prioritized, and not delayed. Your goals and dreams are too important to put off for tomorrow, so make just one small change today.
