24 hours is just enough

The most common response you get when you ask people why they don't spend more time doing what they love or on their side project is: "I don't have time". Other times the answer will be, "I am too busy". It seems to be the norm to accept that there isn't enough time in a day to do what you really want.

When I was in college, a couple classmates and I were really excited about programming. We decided to join force and create something cool. Didn't know what exactly but we just had to do something with our to be learned skill. I had a full time job at the time and was a full time student (12 units). I still managed to squeeze in a good 12 hours during the weekend and every free second I had between class to learn more. I finished all the exercises from the book we used in class, New Perspectives on Javascript, and I was ready to start our project. Unfortunately none of my classmates had the same enthusiasm.

They always had an excuse: I have to have dinner with my family today, one of my friends is depressed, my cat is stuck in the tree, I am very busy on this day, and so on.

10 reasons why you should not deal with it.

I won't give you 10 reasons but for every thing in life you must face there are more than 10 reasons why you shouldn't do it. For example, a friend of my came to me with an idea he was very excited about, I couldn't judge if it was a good or bad idea so I told him to go for it and see how it turns out. Then he started talking about how he need to get a good hosting company, and setup a secure box, how unsafe ssh can be, iptables and so on. Not that his website idea had anything to do with setting up a server but thats where his idea died. It's so much easier not to do something.

Prioritizing

I recently read the about how the CEO of survey monkey built a billion dollar company and is home for dinner at 5:30. He tells of his first start up :

I worked seven days a week, probably 14 or 18-hour days, and never took a day off. That's just what I had to do. It wasn't particularly productive.

Working 14 hours a day doesn't mean you are taking full advantage of all the hours. There will be some times where you are just browsing the web, spinning on your chair, having a conversation on IM. Still you will have spent 14 hours pretending to work.

You will be better off if you have defined goals and use a time management software. The market is saturated with To do applications, you can test 50 of them before choosing the one you like most.

If you feel like you are too busy do this exercise:

Right before going to bed take five minutes to recall all the things you did during the day. Did you really use all of your 14-16 hours awake hours? Think of that annoying thing that you are procrastinating. Is there anyway you could have done it during your day?

Maybe you are too busy, and can't add anything else to your schedule. But remember the old adage: If you want something done, give it to the busiest person.

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