Do you wish you had more time? More time to do the things you want to do?
The truth is, we will never have enough time to do everything, but we will always have enough time to do the important things.
The challenge is prioritizing the important things over the demands and temptations of the less important things.
To use our time well, we need to feed our focus and starve our distractions.
The maxim itself evokes a food analogy. Feeding and starving. Hunger and appetites.
We are going to eat something. We can’t not eat. The question is, what are we going to eat? What do we want to eat? Is what we want to eat good for us?
Similarly, time will continue to flow. We will spend it in one way or another. The question is, how will we spend our time? Will we spend it well?
For some of us, it might be difficult to want to eat food that is good for us. Maybe we have long-standing habits of eating what is fast, convenient, and tastes good. Perhaps those habits have helped us develop an appetite for junk food.
But we can change our appetites by changing our eating habits.
When we quit eating one thing, we eventually want it less.
When we start eating something else, we eventually want it more.
We develop a taste for it.
It is no longer an issue of discipline, but one of desire.
This is true both for our taste buds and for how we use our time.
When we starve our distractions (less important things), we eventually want them less.
When we feed our focus (more important things), we eventually want them more.
What is important to you? Where do you want to focus your time?
What is less important and distracting you from doing more important things? What do you need to starve?
Get clear on these two things first.
Then, understand that you won’t initially like these changes. They will be difficult. They won’t taste good. You will crave your old patterns because they tasted good to you for a long time, even if they weren’t good for you.
Be patient.
Resist your cravings.
Your appetites can and will change.
A few examples for different areas: reading, eating, and exercising.
Examples of Feeding Our Focus
- Reading: If you want to read more, keep a book with you at all times.
- Eating: If you want to eat better, keep good food in the house, in places where it is easy to see and reach when hungry.
- Exercising: If you want to work out in the morning, set out your clothes the night before. (I recently heard someone say that, for years, they went to sleep in their workout clothes to make it easier for them to work out when they woke up.)
Examples of Starving Our Distractions
- Reading: If your TV is distracting you, unplug it. Cancel your streaming subscriptions. If your phone is distracting you, remove certain apps and make it boring.
- Eating: If junk food in your home is a temptation, get rid of it.
- Exercising: If staying up late is causing you to oversleep and keeping you from exercising in the morning, go to bed earlier.
Making things easier or harder to do is not the goal. It is a helpful mechanism. The goal is to use these mechanisms to change our appetites, our desires. This makes it easier to do the things we want to do. Then, the mechanisms reinforce and strengthen our desires. It is easier to be disciplined when you are doing something you want to do.
Feed your focus. Starve your distractions.
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Thank you!
This is great and something that can really help prioritize!!
Thanks Scott!!