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Time Strategies - Ready to Triple the Value of Your Time Choices Today?
Time management strategies provide the most direct route to revitalizing your outlook on life. Your key to success is aligning your time choices with your values.
Whose Life Are You Living?
Your time choices may reflect what you learned from others many years ago. But now those routines may constrict your freedom of movement like an outgrown T-shirt! If you often find yourself restless and frustrated, clarify your current values by completing the following exercise.
1. Create Your Ideal Day
Envision the most personally rewarding day you can imagine. As you create a harmonious flow which follows your personal rhythms, ask yourself:
* When do you embrace active challenges?
* When are you most creative?
* When do you nurture yourself?
* When do you choose solitude, or others' company?
Feel your sense of contentment expand as you align your time choices with your values. Use this exercise to deepen your understanding of your values as you experience what truly energizes and inspires you, not what you feel you "should" value.
This is your time map to self-fulfillment. So include plenty of significant landmarks. Write all of this down, or even sketch it out as a map.
Enjoy it, enhance it and revise it daily for a week or more. As you do so, notice exactly how these choices reflect and champion your values. This will help you translate daydreams into reality.
2. Compare the Real to the Ideal
Now think over a typical day, both weekdays and weekends. How does each differ from your ideal day? How have certain routines dulled your appreciation of the moment? Do you need to find more time for meaningful rituals? Small moments add up.
Identify the origins of time use choices that no longer fit for you. Is there a "should" or "have to" for you to disengage from? Have you modeled portions of your life on the choices of others? What does this mean to you now?
These questions are vitally important, because they reflect how your values change and grow. Substituting new choices is not disloyal to others in your life, or to whom you once were. Instead, you are recognizing how meaning evolves. The more self-referenced you become, the more you encourage others' explorations, too. So the circle of discovery grows.
3. Make the Ideal Real!
Now compare and contrast the two days side by side:
* Envision where each day leads.
* Now identify which elements of your ideal day you can realistically build into your life, short-term and long-term. Create a first step that engages you.
* How can you incorporate your first new step, and then a second, into your current life?
* If an activity in your ideal day can't be realistically incorporated, such as a two-hour workout at the gym every morning, how can you substitute a viable alternative, such as a shorter, targeted series of exercises at home on weekdays?
* How will the addition of one time choice, and the subtraction of another, shape your feeling about the course of your life?
Your wellspring of energy resides in living your values. Tap this power to make the most of your life. It's a simple equation; the more you use this exercise when you outgrow your current life, the more rewarding your time choices!
How can you start implementing these powerful steps to make the very most of your time?
About the Author Coach Paula Eder, Ph.D., The Time Finder Expert, has 35 years of success helping individuals and small businesses align time with values. For free Time Templates + Time Tips, visit Finding TimeEnjoy our blog! TheTimeFinder
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