“I wish I had the time” is a statement that confirms you never will.
How often have you uttered the statement “I wish I had the time” as a reason for failing to do something?
It is easy to excuse away the failure to do something with what we feel is a justifiable reason – which in this case is the feeling that you do not have time to do it and hence that is why you can’t.
Will you ever have the time
Unfortunately, voicing it has pretty much confirmed that you will never have the time, as what you are really saying is that I do not feel it is of sufficient priority to do “it” rather then what you are currently doing?
Now at times you may have so much work that you can’t do everything. However, even in those cases we are still saying to ourselves that the task is still not as important as the work you are currently doing. That is as long as the work you are currently doing isn’t a displacement activity, giving you the chance to procrastinate on the “it” you should be doing.
You need to identify your motivation
So the first thing we need to do when we either mentally, or verbally, say that we wish we had time for the task is to identify our motivation. Is it really because we are too busy or are we putting it off because we don’t want to do it? Is the problem that we don’t know how to start it? If not either of those then we need to look at the value of the task and question why we don’t feel it out weighs what we are currently planning to do. When our true motivation becomes clear then we can address it.
If we don’t want to do it then we will need to force ourselves to confront the reason and overcome it. Have you ever noticed that when you do overcome the reason and force yourself to do it, “it” wasn’t so bad after all.
Journalist Technique
If we don’t know how to start “it” then we can use the “Journalist Technique”, which is to write down everything we know about the problem. We need to answer the five key journalist questions of who, what, where, when or how, which is a great process for ordering the mind to think through the task. We tend to think down one side of the brain, and hence no new solutions may appear no matter how long we think about it, however, by writing it down we will expand the parts of the brain working on it. We use our motor functions to write, or the visual part of our brain to read what we have written, in fact it engages most of the brain when you think on paper and usually by putting it in writing we tend to see the cure in amongst what we have written
Giving it the right priority
Whether we like to think of it this way or not, the reality is that if we are giving it the wrong priority then either accept the situation, or change it by giving “it” a higher priority. This will depend on how much you truly want to achieve the task, which only you can determine.
Whatever you choose will change how you go forward with your current tasks.