August 31. “We all find time to do what we really want to do.” (William Feather)

With all due respect to Sweet Brown, the excuse of not having time to do something is among the lamest. I have said it myself many times over the years. Before March of this year, I didn’t have time to write down what I was eating, or to go to the gym. My schedule was far too tightly packed for taking long walks. It doesn’t stop there. I have said all summer that I didn’t have time to properly clean the garage, or to take on any of a number of home projects.

The truth for all of these examples, and countless others, is that I just didn’t really want to do them. I find time for the things I want to do. If I want to go to the gym after work, then I rearrange my schedule to accommodate it. If I want to get to the gym, and after work isn’t a good time, I wake my sorry rear up in the morning and go. There are still the same number of hours in the day, but I am choosing how I want to spend them, and making priority decisions along the way.

Back in January I wrote a post about Fitting in the Big Rocks. In it I told of a dramatization I used when teaching time management to teens. Recently, a slide show about a similar dramatization has been circulating on Facebook and other social media. The essence of the dramatization is that in life, we have to make choices about how to spend our time and efforts. We have to choose which are the big rocks in our lives, and put those in first. Whether we realize it or not, we make those choices every day.

One of my themes this year has been the notion of living an intentional life. By living with intention, and not just letting life happen to me, I take control of my destiny. I decide where I will be at any given time, and in what direction I am happening. The bumps in the road still occur, but they occur on the road that takes me to my desires and dreams, not on a dusty side road that I wandered onto without realizing. Today’s quote is also about being intentional.

It is true that there are only so many hours in a day, days in a week, and so on. And, I cannot possibly accomplish every idea that pops into my head. There are some ideas, some wants that are unfulfilled. It isn’t that I don’t have the time to do them, it is that I don’t make the time to do them.

As the second third of 2014 draws to a close, my thoughts are about where I will decide to spend my time in the final third of the year. I get to decide what is important, and what fits into my schedule, and I plan to choose well.