You're Not Thinking Fourth Dimensionally
“Marty, you’re not thinking fourth dimensionally!” -Doc Brown, as played by Christopher Lloyd, Back to the Future III
We live in a world that is typically seen as having three dimensions: length, width and height. And it makes sense that we see the world this way because our daily interactions with the three dimensional world around us fit into that paradigm.
Recently my family decided to start growing a small vegetable garden in our yard. Our neighborhood has approximately one million rabbits living in it. This means we need to build an elevated garden box to keep it safe from the hungry critters. I’m no master builder, but I know enough to build a decent elevated garden box. I’ll spare you all the details of everything I considered when deciding to build the garden, but I’ll tell you the first thing we decided was the size. Length, width and height. But of course those three dimensions didn’t fully describe the entire task before me. That’s because there is a fourth dimension in play here.
Time.
I can’t just take the other three dimensions and suddenly have the whole thing materialize itself. Nope, I need to put time into this venture. And knowing my limited skills in this area, I will likely need to put extra time in just to create something functional.
Time is something that has been on my mind a lot lately. You see, everything we do takes effort and it also takes time. I know this might not be a big revelation for you readers out there but go with me. How often in work and life do you find yourself over committed? I, for one, have found that I’ve put myself in that position many times. When I find myself making promises about getting things done, I often consider the effort that it will take but not the time.
Being self employed, most of the projects that I take on are things that I actually want to do. That means that the effort isn’t a big deal because I will likely find the work rewarding. Here’s the problem with that. My attitude about the work can certainly have a huge impact on how heavy the load of work feels to me — but what it cannot do is create more time out of thin air. If only I owned a time-traveling Delorean, then I could create all the time that I needed. Sadly, much to my chagrin, I do not own a time machine with gull-wing doors, or any other kind of doors for that matter.
So if I can’t create time, then what the heck can I do to complete all the things that I want to accomplish? Here’s the hard truth… I can’t. And neither can you. Instead, we will be forced to make trade offs. Here’s the part where we can make a difference. We can make deliberate choices about how we want to use the time we have every day. But what does that look like?
In the past several months, I have been trying to focus more on how I spend my time and what it means for my success and my happiness. So I started cutting out things here and there. At first it was super easy to cut out some things. In fact, leaving my previous job and becoming self employed freed up a lot of time to focus on the work that I really am passionate about. But soon all this extra time allowed me to feel like I had the ability to add so many more things to my plate.
I’m someone who every much suffers from what they call FOMO or fear of missing out. I’m always worried that if I pass up an opportunity, it will turn out to be a huge loss in the long run. So anytime I felt passionate about something, I have a tendency to say “yes.” Of course as those opportunities started stacking up, they became this sort of time debt that began stealing time from things I would rather be focusing on.
The good news here is that the solution to this problem is stupid simple. The bad news is that for us over-committers we don’t want to put the solution into action because that would mean cutting out things that are important to us. This is the part where I remind you that if you don’t make the decision to choose then those commitments/burdens will choose for you and you make not like the things you end up missing out on.
Many times in a blog post I will give you a list of strategies to work through a problem like this, but today I am not going to do that. You already know what you need to do. If you feel like you are over-committed and those commitments are dictating your time for you, then make a list and make some hard choices.
Stick to your guns. Once you know what you believe to be the most important commitments, the ones that truly give you passion and energy, focus on those. And as for the commitments that don’t do those things for you… maybe it’s time to walk away from at least some of them.
The choices may not be easy, but I truly believe that in the end you will be better for it. I know that I was.
If you still find yourself unsure of where your true passion lies and what things you really want to be focusing on in life, then I may be able to help! Send me an email at Jason@yourturncoach.com and let’s spend an hour working though my simple strategy for understanding where your true passion lies.
-Jason