How To Stop Lying To Yourself About Time

Your priorities are like a broken water heater

I once convinced myself I had no time to write. Turns out, I was lying.

My path to published authorship was paved with a detour into real estate investing.

Several years ago, I decided to get into real estate investing because I had been taught that it was the gateway to financial freedom.

I had full-time job, and I paid a couple thousand dollars for a real estate investing course and got to it.

After a while, it became clear that this venture would require some real leg work. I would have to put in an extra hour or two of my time a day on top of my day job.

I was usually too energetically drained after work to apply myself to real estate investing in the evening. But I had paid a few grand for this venture, and I wasn’t going to let that money go to waste.

Then I remembered what a friend of mine had told me years ago – start the day with the most important task on your agenda and get it out of the way.

So I woke up an hour earlier every day, got the real estate business out the way, and then I got to my job.

I learned to buy, fix and hold. I learned to buy, fix and flip. I learned about wholesaling. I invested in a small multi-unit rental property and did well.

Then after about a year of holding the property, I knew that real estate investing wasn’t my passion. My passion was writing.

Yet I had been telling myself that I wasn’t dedicating myself to writing because I couldn’t find the time to fit it in with a full-time job.

But I had proven to myself that I could carve out time for something new. So why wasn’t I doing the same for the thing that truly mattered to me?

It dawned on me that I needed to invest in myself the same way I had invested in that real estate venture.

This reminds me of a story I’ve heard author and time management guru Laura Vanderkam tell. She was working with a woman with a busy schedule and had asked her to track the way she spent her time during the week. During the week of this time tracking exercise, the client’s water heater broke. The woman had water all over her basement so of course she had to find the time to fix it during her busy week.

Well, she got the heater fixed, but it ended up taking her seven hours that week. As Vanderkam points out, “That’s like finding an extra hour in the day.” Yet that woman would probably have told you that she didn’t have that extra hour in her day.

She didn’t create more time—she just reassigned it for something that became a priority. The same principle applies to writing. You don’t need more time; you need to reallocate it.

You do what you prioritize

If you’re telling yourself you don’t have time to write – or to do anything that you say you want to do – all you’re really saying is it’s not a priority.

If you really want to do it, and you’re struggling to find the time, treat it as the equivalent of a broken water heater in your basement. Or something you’ve already invested a couple thousand dollars into.

Though you cannot create more time, you’ll find that time will stretch like elastic to accommodate what you make a priority.

So, what’s your broken water heater? What will you finally make time for this year?

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