If there is one commodity that seems to get away from me, it’s time.

Once it’s passed, it’s gone. I can’t store it up in a basket somewhere and grab some extra when I’m running low. And to complicate matters, everybody gets the same amount everyday. We each get 86,400 seconds every day. And they tick away, one by one, until they’re gone forever.

On some days, I really make my seconds count. I get a ton of things done, and I feel really accomplished. Other days, my time seems to disappear into the void with nothing to show for it. Nothing.

Frankly, that’s frustrating as heck. I get really irritated with myself when I set out to have a productive day, or even a productive hour, and I just waste the time away. Today was one of those days. I was trying to be productive. I planned to be productive. I even set myself up for success…outlining the three tasks that I needed to accomplish for the day. I started out all gang busters, actually performing my GTD (Getting Things Done) review early in the morning before going to church. I had my day laid out, and for once it was a reasonable plan. One where I could accomplish the three tasks and not be so overwhelmed that I just bailed out of the process.

Yet I pretty much quit before I even got started. Nothing got in my way, at least not anything of substance. There were no family emergencies. There was nothing that became a higher priority. Not a darned thing. I just didn’t get started, and hence I didn’t finish anything.

Technically, that’s not entirely true. I managed to ride the stationary bike to get some exercise in. I prepped my Instagram posts for the last two weeks of the month. I did my weekly network and device backups. I planned the meals for the upcoming week. I even did a bunch of other tasks that had piled up and been deferred for a while. But nothing of real importance, and especially nothing that was on my list of things to accomplish today. When you’ve set the bar so low that you have only three things on the list, it’s really discouraging to not accomplish any of them.

In the midst of my funk, I got a reply to a question that I’d posed on twitter the night before. I’ve been contemplating whether I should subscribe to Amazon Kindle Unlimited or whether I should get an Audible Audiobooks subscription. I’ve really been struggling with this decision, and the twitter response was a welcome diversion from all the other things that I wasn’t doing…so I got into a conversation with my friend from England who had responded. A few tweets later he said something so subtle, but so profound that it stopped me in my tracks. Specifically he said “I don’t get or make the time for reading but still consume a lot via audible”. I responded that I have been using the Coach.me app to track my progress on increasing my reading and it’d been really successful. At that point, the conversation pretty much died. We both had a lot of things to do, and we found other diversions to keep us from doing what we were supposed to do.

But the idea of making time really stuck with me today. The things that really interest me get my attention, and I make time for them. Sometimes they’re the big things in life, but more often than not, they’re little things. Most of the time, I just flit from task to task, or item to item without being particularly intentional about it. As I started to think more and more about making time for the things that matter to me, I decided that I want to become more intentional about my decisions as to what I’m doing.

I do know how to be more intentional. I simply have to do it. I’m perfectly clear as to what actions I need to take to set myself up for success and then know exactly what it takes to follow-through to complete the tasks I’ve laid out. I even know that I have to be reasonable about my daily list of things to do so that I don’t get overwhelmed and end up watching llama videos on Youtube. Don’t laugh, I’ve sunk that low. More than once!

So I’m going to take some very concrete steps to help myself be more intentional about what I do. Namely:

• Plan my day’s tasks the night before
• Start the day looking at my task manager (currently ToodleDo) to ensure that I’ve got a solid plan
• Check my calendar to determine when I have hard deadlines for events
• Review the planned tasks against my larger goals to ensure that I’m somewhere in the right ballpark
• Assess my progress throughout the day
• Avoid beating myself up for not making progress while gently cajoling myself to get something done
• Review my progress at the end of the day and assess where I won and where I went off track

As you can see, it’s not rocket science. It’s simply a plan that I can implement without a lot of work, yet has the potential to help me make big changes in my routine and lifestyle a little bit at a time. I didn’t get to where I am in a day, and I know it’s going to take a while to correct the bad habits that I’ve gotten into.

Here goes a new beginning at being intentional and making time for those things that matter…