Psychologies

How to own your valuable time

Earlier today, faced with a looming deadline, I realised that I was cutting it too fine for comfort. ‘I just don’t have enough time for everything!’ I wailed in exasperation, as I typed a message to a stranger on Instagram asking her where she got her armchair reupholstered, and what the courier costs were. It pains me to admit that I don’t even have an armchair.

“Even with a vast tundra of white space in my diary, I wasn’t making progress on any of my yearned-for life changes”

This, in a nutshell, seems  to symbolise our problem with time and managing it cleverly. When we don’t get around to making our most cherished goals happen, we blame our overbooked schedules, but is a lack of time really the reason?

During last year’s lockdowns, for the first time in my life, I was forced to confront an uncomfortable fact: Even with a vast tundra of white space in my diary, I still wasn’t making meaningful progress on any of my yearned-for life changes, or moving towards my plethora of long-held goals. Clearly, a scarcity of minutes and hours had not been the culprit after all.

So, I went on a mission to speak to productivity experts, therapists, coaches and authors and put together the following eight powerful strategies to overcome that No 1 killer of time, procrastination.

What I have learned will hopefully help you use your time more wisely and

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