“Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of. One man gets only a week’s value out of a year while another man gets a full year’s value out of a week.”
Charles Richards

There are many important things in life.

Your family and friends. A hobby perhaps. Working out and staying healthy. 

The most important relationship in your life. And reading, learning and growing as a person.

But finding the time for what is most important in life is not always easy. It sometimes feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

But even if it may not feel like it, there are often ways to improve how you use your attention and your time.

This week I’d like to share 6 of the best questions I have found for doing just that and for shaking yourself out of a rut.

1. What are the top 3 most important priorities in my life right now?

With a lack of focus on what is most important in your life it becomes easy to spend too much time and energy on aimless actions or work.

On things that aren’t really that important but you do out of old habit or because of other unhelpful reasons.

To keep your attention in the right place it is essential to remind yourself every day of what is truly most important to you.

So ask yourself: what are the top 3 most important priorities in my life right now?

Write those three things down on two notes and put one in your workspace and the other one on your bedside table.

2. What are the 1-3 most common distractions that keep me from doing my work in a focused way?

Figure out how you can prevent those things from distracting you. It could be by:

• Shutting the door to your office.
• Putting your phone in silent mode.
• Having notifications for your email or an instant messaging program/app shut off.

3. What are the 1-3 most common distractions that keep me from having quality time with the people closest to me?

The answer could for instance be your smart phone, TV-shows you just watch out of routine and not because you like them very much or bringing your work back home.

Then figure out how you can reduce or eliminate those distractions.

4. What is one healthy limit I can start setting in my life this week?

One of the smarter ways to simplify your life and to free up time is to set limits.

Here are a few key areas that you can set powerful and healthy limits for:

• Your daily input. Reduce the number of blogs, newsletters, magazines, book clubs, podcasts, TV-shows etc. you follow. Just keep the ones you are really getting something out of.
• Email. Just check and process your email during one chunk of time once per day. Instead of checking it 10 times or more each day.
• Social activities. Write down a list of the social activities you are involved in after school or work. Maybe you are involved in a club or an activity that it is not as fun or rewarding as it used to be. Maybe you want to rearrange your priorities a bit to focus on something else this fall.

5. How can I minimize or eliminate one thing I may have missed?

What else can you eliminate or minimize?

Some meetings at work or in school? Redditing or some online forum you hang out on a lot?

Really question and reconsider your own daily and weekly habits regularly instead of moving along in the same old tracks just because it is what you usually do.

6. What is one piece of unnoticed or misused piece of free time during my regular day?

There is often quite a bit of open travel- or waiting-time during a year.

What will you use such time for as we go into the fall this year?

Perhaps you would like to read more while riding the train or while waiting for a meeting to start.

I, for example, often listen to podcasts while I’m out and about or while waiting for a meeting.

Even if you only have 10-20 minutes of commuting time each day you still have a many, many hours in a year that you may want to, at least partly, use in a new way.

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“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
Buddha

“People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it.”
Edith Schaeffer

One common way to get things done, to achieve and to motivate yourself is to be kind of hard on yourself.

To set very high standards for yourself that you want to stick to every time.

Now, this way of going about things can indeed help you to accomplish big things in your life and to get things done every week.

But it comes at a price.

Three negative things about taking this position towards yourself are:

You tear your self-esteem down. 

As you achieve things you tend to tear down your own self-esteem at the same time.

So you feel less and less like you deserve success. And frustration and being angry can become more and more common as you fail to reach those very high standards.

You suck the fun and excitement out of things.

A hard or harsh attitude towards yourself has a tendency to make things that used to be fun and exciting less and less so.

This attitude does instead over time turn those things into just work that you may start to dread because you fear failure or not meeting your high standards.

You’ll perform worse and worse.

As your self-esteem goes down you’ll feel less motivated to tackle the tasks and projects in your life. As the fun and excitement goes out of many of the things you do procrastination tends to become more and more common.

Plus, the work you put in becomes less energetic and focused and so the results aren’t that good anymore either.

I used to take the harder and harsher path. It did help in some ways. But it wasn’t worth it.

So what can you do if you feel that you are maybe too hard on yourself or you beat yourself up quite often?

Here are 4 tips that helped me to become kinder towards myself, to get more of the most important things done and to feel better about myself and my life.

1. Remind yourself of the negative effects of this attitude.

To just remind yourself of how damaging being hard on yourself has been is in my experience a very effective way to replace the old habit with going easier on yourself.

2. Go for more human and smarter standards for yourself.

Movies, books and the people around you may push standards on you that are just pure fantasy or some kind of perfect dream.

But life is life, not a fantasy or dream and to set such extremely high standards that no one can live up to just leads to what you may see as failure and disappointment in yourself and in your life.

Instead, relax a bit and accept that everything and everyone has flaws and things don’t always go as planned.

Accept that you can still improve things but they will never be perfect.

And realize that you won’t be rejected if things or you aren’t perfect. At least not by reasonably well-balanced human beings, like most people actually are in reality.

3. Focus on the positive and helpful feedback in setbacks.

It is very common to be hard on yourself when you make a mistake or fail.

But it is also a very destructive habit because it can magnify one such event into something that makes you feel depressed for days or weeks or makes you quit altogether.

So when you are hard on yourself for a failure or mistake then relax a bit and go a bit easier on yourself. Remind yourself of why this is a much better strategy to keep the motivation and self-esteem up.

And ask yourself:

• What is one thing I can I learn from this situation?
• How can I use what I learn from this to not make the same mistake again and to move forward in a smarter way?

4. Celebrate your small steps of forward.

If you are in the habit of only celebrating when you reach a big milestone or a perfect moment or two then you may lose your motivation and feel like you are never happy or arriving where you want to be.

So make a habit of celebrating your small daily and weekly successes too.

This will help you to keep the soul-tiring monotony away and help you to stay enthusiastic instead of getting more and more unmotivated until you may even consider quitting halfway to that big milestone.

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