“There aren’t enough hours in the day.”
If you’ve ever said this before, well…you’re in good company. It’s easy to feel like you can’t keep up with the pace of life no matter how hard you try. But in this do-more, efficiency-is-best culture in which we live, is this pace the best thing for us?
I’d venture to say it’s not. Each one of us gets 24 hours in a day—no more, no less. We can’t somehow dig up more hours somewhere. Time is a valuable resource, and it takes practice to steward it well. And another thing? We’re all human. We all get tired and need rest. We all have limits. We all make mistakes. Accepting your humanity is essential because it gives you permission to not always have control and to not always be right. It puts you back on the same playing field as everyone else, as opposed to feeling better than others if you hustle more than the next guy. Over time, a life of constant hustle is just, well, exhausting.
So the truth remains: You cannot be all things to all people. There will be times when you need to ask for help and outsource some things. If you’re feeling spread thin, here’s an exercise that might benefit you:
Write down everything you spend time on (family responsibilities, work assignments, recreation activities, etc.) and then decide what is: 1) allocated to you, 2) outsourced, and 3) put on the backburner. While making these decisions, ask yourself: What lights me up? What gets me excited? What do I really love? You’ll have to prioritize—because if everything is important, then nothing is important.
In her book It’s All Under Control, Jennifer Dukes Lee challenges us to take a similar approach by examining each piece of our lives and setting it in one of three categories: do, delegate, or dismiss. She acknowledges that we can’t always delegate or dismiss because we dislike something (tracking expenses for your job, for example), but she gets to the heart of our reluctance to dismiss: we don’t like to disappoint people. We want to be seen as reliable in meeting their expectations. Hear this, friend: You don’t owe it to others to push beyond your core values and boundaries in order to get their approval.
Let this be an encouragement to find out who you are and what you love, making decisions in light of those priorities. The more we learn about ourselves, the more we can become confident in who we’re meant to be and step into that—without guilt, shame, or imperfection hindering us on the journey.
If you enjoyed this article, listen to my guest appearance on the Dream Cast podcast.