To Reach Your Goals, First De-Clutter Your Life

If you want to reach your goals, you have to make room for those goals in your life. That seems an obvious statement doesn’t it. But what if you want to study a course that will help you to further your career? You have to take a look at your life and see how much time do you actually have available.

Stephen Covey, in his book First Things First, describes a time management speaker using a jar and rocks as props for a talk. The speaker asks the group how many rocks do they think he can get in the jar. After the guesses are made, he proceeds to put the large rocks into the jar. He asks if the jar is full. The group answers that it is full, but of course, it isn’t. The speaker proceeds to add small rocks, sand, and water. The point is that if he hadn’t put the big rocks into the jar first, then all the little rocks, sand, and water would have filled it and there wouldn’t have been room for the big rocks.

Will a new goal fit into your life if you are already rushing every day to complete the tasks you have to do in terms of your commitments to work, your relationship with your partner, spending time with your elderly parents, the hobby you have, the musical instrument you are trying to learn, the marathon you want to run for the first time and never mind keeping in touch with your friends?

If your goal is important to you, then you have to make the time to work on it. But where in your busy schedule would a course fit? No where, most likely. But you sign up for it anyway. Within the first month you find yourself not attending the evening classes and not handing in assignments. You just don’t have time.

Somehow, in our minds, the time available to us has an elasticity that has no boundary. Of course this is not the case and many times we set ourselves up for failure by not de-cluttering our lives sufficiently to make time to achieve a goal we have set.

Examine your day and see where you spend your time. How much of your time is being wasted on non-essential activities? Which of those can be let go and which activities have to be kept. Get rid of the clutter that keeps you frantically busy but that gets you absolutely nowhere. You may have to make some hard decisions about what you need to get rid of or at least put off for now until you have reached your goal.

We all have mountains of clutter around. This could be physical clutter that means that every time we are looking for something it takes twice the time to find it. Or, it could be tasks that we have taken on doing by ourselves (such as doing all the housework while our partner watches TV) that eats up our free time.

All you need to do is take a closer look at what you fill your day with and with some clever planning you could free substantial time for all sorts of great achievements. Check everything you do in a regular day to see whether it needs doing or whether it can be relegated to the trash can of bad habits. You will be surprised how much time you spend on aimless tasks that add no value to your life.

You might be able to combine some repetitive tasks like checking your email a couple of times a day instead of every hour, or finding a quicker route to work, or finding a few shops close together instead of spread out all over town. Just canceling some of the time spent in front of the TV could help you find the time needed to attain a wonderful goal such as learning a new language.

Take a close look at what you do daily and weekly and you’ll be surprised to find places where you can de-clutter your life and fit in those big rocks to reach the goals that will make your life worthwhile.

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