Ready to relinquish your busy badge?

Those excuses are more common than the common cold. When life and work get busy, or when you don’t want to feel guilty about avoiding a task or an obligation, the time excuse rolls off of your lips. Time, or lack thereof, is a lousy excuse.

Stop convincing yourself that you don’t have the time to be successful.

Everyone is busy, so that lame excuse means nothing anymore. Chronic excuse-making is an excellent way to evade doing the work that needs to be done.

Since no one has figured out how to add more hours to the day, the best you can do is use the time that you do have more efficiently. No miracle tool exists that will eliminate the work that we all have to do on a daily basis.

You cannot manage time.

You can only manage your priorities. I don’t believe you have a time-management problem. You have a priority dilemma.

Jim Rohn says, “When you want to do something, you make the time. When you don’t, you find an excuse.”

How true. How many times a day or a week do you utter this income-killing phrase? Start taking ownership of the time you do have. Your time is your most valuable resource. Don’t misuse it.

It is time to relinquish your busy badge.

Professionals who have the right attitude think: Even though I’m busy, I will make time for marketing this week. I will work a few extra hours and network on LinkedIn. I will attend a lunch meeting, even though my schedule is tight.

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. You are either using your time prudently or frittering it away.

No one has enough time in the day for everything they want to do. However, if something is a priority, you must make the time. When you find yourself thinking – I don't have time – it may mean that that particular task is not a priority or you didn’t want to do it in the first place, so you blame it on your lack of time.

My belief is that I haven’t got the time is code for I haven’t got the desire.

Hundreds of books and thousands of articles dispensing advice about how to manage time are out there, but time-management skills are of no value if you don’t know what things to manage or don’t know your priorities.

Time is precious; it is not your enemy.

It is important to figure out what the highest priority on the list and what can wait.

Ask yourself: is this urgent, important or non-essential. If you want something badly enough  nothing will stop you; nothing will get in your way. Even mountains will crumble into molehills.

Here come the tired and overused excuses! Any of these sound familiar:

I’d like to get out of my office and network more, but I don’t have time right now.

It would be great to grab a coffee and re-connect, but I don’t know where I would find the time.

I should go to more conferences, but with my schedule, there’s no time.

I know I should get out of the office more, but I am super busy.

I’ve worked myself to the bone and I’m too tired to make the time.

The list goes on, but the theme is the same. People blame time itself for all of their incompletions, inefficiencies, lack of production, the absence of income and clients. Blaming time is an easy and socially acceptable excuse. Time is a concept that has no vested interest in what you do with it. You cannot control much in life, but you can control the way that you spend your time.

Why would you want to broadcast to the world that your time-management skills are non-existent?

The in-your-face reality is that blaming a lack of time for your failure to act usually means that you didn’t want to put forth the effort for the task to be completed in the first place. As a result, professionals expend their time and energy justifying their lack of performance instead of focusing on ways to improve it. They are becoming adept at the I-don’t-have-time excuse.

I am sympathetic to family and work commitments. But time is malleable; it can be stretched, it accommodates the committed, those searching for the holy grail of achievement.

We are all busy. Life is busy. Even toddlers are busy. You and I each have the same amount of time every day. Everyone on earth has 168 hours to divvy up throughout the week. It is what you do with your time that determines where your practice ends up. Pay attention to how many times a day you blame a lack of time for not getting things done.

This distasteful ritual may be averted. Pay attention to how many minutes you fritter away every time you find yourself mindlessly researching on the internet, scrolling on Facebook or checking your news feed on LinkedIn.

It does not matter the profession; you still need to keep up the pursuit and make time to keep your client pipeline full. Time is not your adversary.

Being responsible for how you use your time is the process of seeing it, owning it, solving it, controlling it and doing it. Scrutinizing your use of time requires a level of ownership that includes doing what is necessary and focusing on proactive accountability, not reactive excuses.

Excuses keep you stuck in the same holding pattern of not being responsible. Excuse-making is not the conduit to success, surrendering your busy badge is.

Do you have a busy badge that needs to be surrendered?