So with this post I’m going to be accusing myself according to the belief that I hold. Actually there’s a lot of things in life that I might seem a bit hypocritical about but I try my best to change that. Anyway, one of the things that I hear repeatedly from a lot of individuals is the concept of “I have no time to do that” or “I’m too busy”. I’m a believer that there is no such thing as “I have no time” and rather it’s a concept of what you prioritize in life.

The way I look at things, we’re always going to have a queue of things to do in life. Think about it from the time that you wake up to the time that you sleep. It seems that you always have things that are constant. You have to get up, do your business in the bathroom, shower, brush your teeth, drive to work, do actual work, come home, prepare dinner, sleep. Those are some of the things that are ingrained into us and we have to do it as part of our routine. However, with the hectic schedules that we have, we usually end up just doing that routine and that’s it. We often dont’ take the time to properly rest ourselves or to properly reflect on what we’ve done during the day. Sometimes we don’t even have the time to figure out what we want to do in the future, both long term and short term. We always fall back and say, “I have no time”.

Why is it that we always say that? Why do we never have time? I really believe that it’s not that we don’t have time, it’s that we prioritize everything else and end up focusing all of our energies on that instead.

Ok, so that theory makes sense but can’t you argue that because we focus on a lot of things, we literally don’t have enough time? Sure, you can think of it that way but my main point i’m trying to prove here is that if we really want to do something, we can find the time to do it.

Think about your routine again. Do you stray from your routine very often? Most likely you don’t unless you’re sick or something else major in your life throws it for a loop. So what would happen if you actually inserted things you wanted to do and accomplish in your life in that routine? What if you took that 15 minutes at the end of the day to relax and read a book? What if you got a morning run every single day? What if it all became routine? Then all of the sudden something that you thought you didn’t have time to do becomes natural and you feel weird if you don’t actually do the activity.

What if you could do that? Well, I say that you can. I think that you can add an activity one by one to your schedule to make it a permanent addition.

In my own life, I think I need to do a better job of reorganizing my priorities. There are a lot of times that it’s so focused on work and getting more and more things done that I tend to not take care of myself enough. There was a period a few weeks ago that I was able to play basketball on a fairly regular basis and I felt the balance come back to my life. But it’s been my experience that I go through periods of this and don’t stick with it. The problem here is that I just haven’t been able to prioritize consistently working out in my life. I need to do a better job of that in order to get to the balance that I hope to seek.

Anyway, I’m probably going off on a little tangent here but my main point is this: life is dictated by what you prioritize is important. Oftentimes we find that we do absolutely nothing instead of taking action steps towards accomplishing a goal. If we’re able to actually insert that action into our daily routine, we can turn the excuse of “I have no time” into something more constructive in your life.

~The Lermz

Michael Lerma

Michael Lerma graduated the University of Notre Dame in 2009 with an Information Technology Management degree. He currently works for The Nielsen Company in their Emerging Leaders Program.