"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."
- -Stephen Covey

Not enough time? The biggest complaint I hear from my clients, colleagues, friends, and family is that there just isn’t enough time in the day.  The second biggest complaint is not having enough money.   Why is it that some people seem to have enough time and money -- regardless of economic status -- to manage everything that is most important, and yet others never seem to have enough, no matter what their circumstances?

At various points in my life, I’ve been known to complain about not having enough time or money.  What I’ve come to realize is that I get what I focus on.  If I focus on not having enough – enough time, enough money, enough anything -- that’s what I get…not enough!  The truth is, I do have enough time and money for what matters most, if I choose to focus the resources I have on what’s most important. 

It helps me to remember this truth:  Every time I say yes to someone or something, I am, in fact, saying no to someone or something else.  Here’s a powerful question I ask myself regularly:  "What do I choose  to say "yes" to today?"  It's a simple question that has a profound impact on how I spend my time and money. 

Now it’s time for true confessions.  I hired someone to redesign my company website, and they completed their work in May of this year.  You have not seen my new website until today because I’ve been telling myself over the past six months that I didn't have enough time to work on the necessary revisions.  I complained to my coach about this for several months.  Of course, I had good excuses as to why I didn’t have time…I’ve had a full slate of clients, I had some out-of-town trips planned, and the list of excuses goes on.  But at some point, I got tired of saying NO to working on my website, and I decided to say YES to little pieces of it. 

Here’s how I got it done:

• I followed my own advice.  (I often ask my clients, “How do you eat an elephant?...One bite at a time!")  I broke the work down into manageable bites that I could chew!
  
• I asked for help.  I hired others to create some of the new sections you will find on my site.  I have delegated the work that I did not enjoy or was not good at doing to my Webmaster and my Business Coach.  (Thank you, Pat and Peggy!  You’re wonderful!!!)
  
• I scheduled blocks of time to work on specific bites.  Then when others asked if I had free time to devote to something else, it was much easier to say no to things that were not on my list of priorities.
  
• I have scheduled more time for self-care, which has given me more energy to devote to this monumental task.
  
• I have continued my personal work as a recovering perfectionist.  I decided that my website did not have to be perfect or completely done before I shared it with others.  (Yes, you will find some sections that are still under construction.)

• How do you define success NOW? Are you at a different place in your life than where you were 5 or 10 years ago? Perhaps you’ve outgrown an old definition of success that you’ve been trying to live by. Write down how you define success today.

• What do you need to let go of in order to attract more of what you want? You have a limited amount of energy and time available to invite new opportunities into your life. It may be time to let go of whatever is holding you back in order to free up time and energy for what you want more of. What are you ready to let go of?

• What new systems do you need to have in place to eliminate the stress that may come with achieving greater levels of success? Can you automate repetitive processes, or organize and declutter so you can find important information with ease?

•  What additional support will you need? What can you delegate so you have more time and energy to attract what you want more of?  Without someone else to handle the tasks you no longer enjoy or have time for, you'll have a tough time inviting more success.

• How do you need to grow personally to handle the next level of success? Will your current level of self-esteem allow you to accept or create more abundance? Are you disciplined enough to pass up “good” opportunities for “great” ones? Can you get comfortable with disappointing others when their priorities are not aligned with yours and you need to say no? Do you need to get more organized in order to handle additional responsibilities?

"If we let go of what we're trying to get more of, which we really don't need, it frees up reserves of vitality to make a difference with what we have. When you make a difference with what you have, it expands. This applies to love, to time, to relationships -- and, of course, to money. If you sit down and make a difference with the money that you have, you will find that your experience of it expands, and you don't have that focus on scrambling to get more of what you don't really need -- which is what most of us are so busy doing that we don't even notice who we are and what we have. By contrast, the context of sufficiency is making a difference with who you are, what you have, and knowing that it's whole, complete, and exactly enough. It's perfection."

--Lynne Twist