If you’re like me, every day is busy. Work is busy. Family is busy. Life is busy! Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to fit everything in so I wanted to share three of my tips for overcoming busy-ness.

My sisters have adopted a couple of techniques to help find more time during the day. Rachel gave up Candy Crush. While playing a game for a few minutes at a time can be relaxing, the makers of these games study human behaviour carefully and create experiences that trigger your brain to want to play more. She figured she was losing precious time every day that she wanted to use for her own business so Rachel just gave it up. And guess what? She found a whole bunch of time that she can reallocate to build her business.

Kirsten wrote a whole post on how she found ten extra hours per week. Figuring out how to use time differently is a great technique – you can look at your day or your week and reframe or repurpose your time.

Finding more time, or more specifically “repurposing” my time, has also worked for me. In particular, I have been re-framing and using my commuting time in different ways. Where I always used to use it for work, and sometimes still do, I also look forward to reading, listening to podcasts, watching a movie or sometimes just sleeping for a few more minutes.

But to really try to overcome my overwhelming sense of being perpetually busy, I’ve been working on three things:

1. Doing nothing every day
2. Forgiving myself if I don’t get “it” done
3. Remembering tomorrow is a new day

Doing Nothing Every Day

This one might sound strange, but I have so many things to do, I used to try to make all of my time productive. This means if I’m watching TV with my family, I’ll be folding laundry or mending something.

I have a hard time with just sitting there, being in the moment and enjoying the show.

So part of my personal development has been to really strive to do “nothing” other than to be in the moment. And to let my body and brain just do “nothing”.

Even though I still sometimes find myself itching to do something productive during these moments of down time, I know it is so important for me to be able to carve out some time just to rest and do nothing. And the best part of this is that it gives my body and soul a chance to relax and recover.

Forgiving Myself if I Don’t Get “it” done

This year, my son’s birthday snuck up on me. He wanted to have a small sleepover party with three friends. I have email addresses for two of the sets of parents, but I don’t have an email address for the parents of my son’s third friend. This friend lives close by but we only ended up dropping off a party invitations on Friday night for the very next night, Saturday.

This is not great invitation etiquette – it’s kind of mortifying actually… but it was what I was able to do, while I tried to balance the demands of my home life with the demands of regularly working out of town.

Sometimes something has to give, and so I just try to remember that I can only do what I can do.

The good news is that despite my lack of etiquette and not living up to my own expectations of myself as a mother, the friend was still able to come to the party and my son had a great time.

And so…it all worked out.

Remembering that Tomorrow is a New Day

Every day I get up with way too many things on my to-do list so I try to tackle my to-dos based on my own internal prioritization criteria. At work, we’re always balancing competing priorities and deadlines. And typically, there’s more to get done than can be completed.

So when I’m leaving for the day and I’m encouraging my team members to leave work as well, I remind them, and myself, that tomorrow is a new day.

I love this idea because it reminds me that we get to wipe the slate clean overnight, and start fresh the next morning – that tasks we didn’t quite get completed today can be tackled tomorrow, with fresh eyes, more energy, and a new perspective.

P.S. I’m also working on saying “NO” so that my list is not quite so long and my life is not quite so busy… but that’s a topic worthy of another post.

As you work through your often overwhelming daily to-do list, we would love to hear your tips for overcoming busy-ness. Please post a comment below!

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