I remember feeling like there was no time to do anything. Like, nothing. Ever. No time to exercise, no time to clean, no time to read even a single Bible passage, and certainly no time to relax. These were all things I knew needed to be done, yet I felt there just wasn't enough time in the day to do them.
Eventually, I took a real hard look at what I was doing during the day. I was truthful with myself and realized that much of what I was doing during the day was, what I like to call, a time suck. Something pointless, unproductive, and sucked away precious minutes from my day. Things like mindlessly scrolling through Facebook and Pinterest, watching hours of nonsense television (I'll admit, Real Housewives is my guilty pleasure), checking my email 75 times a day only to see the same crap emails over and over again. At one point, I had no structure to my day. No plan. I'd aimlessly go through my day only to find myself at the end of the day with little to nothing accomplished.
That was several years ago. To undo all of those habits, I made purposeful decisions. I deleted Facebook from my phone completely. I only have Pinterest to reference recipes or workouts when I need to. I stopped looking at my phone first thing in the morning and set a lock time on my apps after a certain point in the day. I looked at when it made the most sense for me to go to the gym without needing to give up "mom time" (which initially was in the evening after the kids went to bed around 7---now they're much older and don't go to bed until after I'm asleep most nights). I came up with a schedule for my day to keep myself and the kids in a routine so that everyone was more productive and happier. Turns out structure and routine isn't just for kids!
Making purposeful use of your time is crucial to creating more time. Even though you can't literally create more time, you can make the most of the time that IS available to you. I'd encourage you to try tracking your time for a few days. Write down what you do ALL DAY LONG and track how long you do those things for so that you can see with your own eyes what you're doing with your time. From there, you can figure out how to better use your time and where you're the most productive (or, alternatively, the least productive). Also, a fun feature on iPhones is your screen time report each week. My personal goal is to continually see my percentage go down every week.
Try these things and see how it goes. If it works, great! If not, then let's try something different. Life is all about trial and error, or trying and learning. But, just by trying this thing, you're already making more purposeful use of your time.
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