Time, for me, is like ice cream for a five-year-old. I treat time like I treat a beautiful woman – with respect. This sweetheart called time is a scarce resource that we’re all taking for granted. We piss our time up against the wall like it’s nothing.

We treat our time like it’s an overflowing beer on a Saturday night that we piss out after we’ve numbed the pain or our failure and lack of action.

It’s time to take back our time. It’s time to take back what is rightfully ours and move forward with momentum and optimism. YOU ARE LITERALLY KILLING YOURSELF AND YOUR DREAM BY WASTING TIME! Make a stand! Wage war with time!

Your dream is won or lost in your spare time

Your goal above all else should be to do the following:

1. Get shelter
2. Find love
3. Help others
4. Achieve your dream

These four things are the basic requirements for you to truly live. You can’t avoid them and without one of them, you’ll be massively handicapped in your pursuit for meaning. The hardest part about being successful is trying to achieve your dream.

That’s because achieving your dream takes a hell of a lot of time. Your dream is not just something you can whip up in a few minutes like a packet of two-minute noodles. To achieve your life’s purpose and be successful, you have to dedicate time to it.

It annoys the crap out of me how many people I meet who want to conquer some giant feat, but then put zero time into it. We are all chasing this overnight success that doesn’t exist. Your spare time my friends is where your dreams and goals come true.

I’ve studied all the great’s of our time and they all seem to be mediocre on the surface. The difference is that these tycoons of their field spent an unreasonable amount of time chipping away at all the goals required to achieve their dream.

They weren’t, during the middle of the freaking week, having a few beers at 11 pm at night. These champions were probably up late at night working on their dream or rising early, but they certainly weren’t wasting a single ounce of time.

Nothing that is worth achieving can be done in a short space of time. Achievements that are remembered decades later take time. We all have the same amount of hours in a day. What we’re missing is that when we get home from work / running a business, we waste the time between the late afternoon and before we go to bed.

Then we wake up in the morning and waste the most productive hours of the day tucked up in bed or having a long and unnecessary breakfast for the sake of wasting time. The last thing on your mind should be any task that doesn’t link to your dream and ultimately your success.

You have more spare time than you think

People keep asking me where I find the time to write. In actual fact, I use the time that others waste. I wake up early on a Saturday and blog for a few hours, then I do the same on Sunday. Meanwhile, my friends are just waking up as I’ve finished working away on my blogging dream.

During the week, I wake up early again to edit, find feature images, check grammar and format my blog posts. Again, by the time everyone else wakes up I’ve already finished working on my dream for the day.

To find these extra hours I had to do the following:

– Go to bed earlier
– Not reply to constant social media messages
– Eat energy enriching foods
– Give up TV
– Give up coffee
– Time block phone calls

To gain more time I essentially reduced non-dream producing activities. If I was engaging in something like TV that had no net benefit, then I gave it up.

“Sacrifice is the antidote to time-wasting”

The hours you need to be successful and achieve your dream are there. If you add up all the time you spend doing useless nonsense, you’ll find that you have more hours that you can fill with your dream producing tasks.

Time wasters are everywhere

One day, I sat at work and added up all the unannounced conversations that people had with me where they weren’t invited. These conversations happen because I’ve noticed people are bored or unfulfilled. When you’re in this state, it’s easier to go and distract someone else with useless talk about reality TV shows, than it is to work at something that you don’t love.

At the end of one workday that went for eight hours, I counted at least three hours of useless conversations where people walked over and interrupted me. Now you’re probably thinking I’m some anti-social a$$, but I promise you I’m not.

What I am is someone that likes to get stuff done and save the small talk for social occasions where I’m letting my hair down. A lot of small talk is often in the form of complaints. These complaints exist because someone, somewhere, has violated someone else’s rule about how the game of life is played.

Drop the rules, avoid the small talk and don’t allow yourself to be distracted easily. You’ll find you gain at least another three hours in your day.

Time is really all you have

I was on a podcast the other week called “Success Talks.” I do podcast interviews all the time so I can give back and share some of what I’ve learned. At the end of the interview, I normally like to chat with the host and find out their why.

At the end of this particular podcast, I asked the host what he did for a living and he told me he had a bunch of childcare centers and a large workforce of photographers. “Okay cool, obviously a high-roller,” I thought to myself quietly.

He then explained to me that in 2015 he had a stroke and realized that while he was earning a lot of money that he could leave behind for his family, what he really wanted was to leave a legacy. Instantly, the hairs on the back of my neck stood tall.

This friendly podcast host had decided to stop spending time making money and spend his time leaving a legacy that can add value to people’s lives. He realized that in the end, all we have is time. How we use our time is up to us. He’d decided that he would no longer follow society rules for success.

This champion decided that it was time to start a podcast, mastermind, online course, and to attend all the events that exist out there to lift people up and teaching them something.

“It took a stroke for him to realize that life is precious and we have to think very carefully about our purpose”

Don’t let a stroke or major health problem be the catalyst for you to stop wasting time. For me, I let a near miss with cancer have this same effect and if I had my time again I would have acknowledged the importance of time sooner.

So what are you going to do?

I don’t spend my limited time on this planet writing this advice for you so you can waste it like the toilet paper in a public toilet. This stuff is serious to me and I genuinely want you to gain results. If nothing else, at the end of reading this article I want you to make a decision.

That decision involves writing a list of all the things you do each week that are unrelated to your dream or have no joy and fulfillment. Once you have your list, I want you to time each activity. Now I’m not some moron that believes that everything you ever do has to form part of your dream.

Obviously, you have housework, family, etc, that you need to take care of. The purpose of this exercise is to find the things like social media, TV, complaining with work colleagues, and so on, and either cut it out or limit it. This will give you the time you need to divert time back into your dream.

By doing this, I believe you can be even more successful and create a legacy. Time is your best friend if you know how to use it.

If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net