Just Say No
Every day is a never ending battle against the time wasters in your life. People, things, email, errands, and all kinds of other little knick knacks are competing for your valuable attention. You have to decide where to focus it to get the biggest return on investment of your time. Ultimately, how good of a return you got will be up to you to define.
I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for a few hours tonight after not having played it much in the last 3 weeks. That made me happy and feel ready to leave it alone again for a while. Now I’m refreshed and ready to get back to work on my marketing endeavors. Is the PS3 a complete mind-numbing time waster? You bet it is, but it brings a lot of people a lot of joy and they enjoy playing it for hours on end. Controlling the time I spend on it will allow me to enjoy it periodically but still make more time to do the things that get me results in REAL life.
Recognizing that I need to start cutting back on those things that steal my precious time is my biggest task for this year. Checking email less, playing video games less, and talking on the phone less are all things I plan on implementing. It’s hard to cut back if you’ve already accepted these things as the norm and are saying “yes” to them on a subconscious level. It doesn’t matter what Jim Carrey did in the movie “Yes Man”. It was just a metaphor for experiencing life more fully and not turning your back on what could become a great experience. In order to have those experiences, you have to say “no” to the things that are pulling the wool over your eyes and keeping you bogged down by a million pointless tasks that either can wait, aren’t important, or can be ignored altogether.
My question of the day is this: What can you say “no” to more often so that you can make more time for the things that deserve a “yes”?
