"Make the state of your mind more important than what you are doing." --Hugh Prather

My husband, David, and I had a little tiff yesterday. We trade off making the meals and it was his turn to make dinner. And, one of the changes we are working on is eating earlier and taking a walk after dinner in the extended twilight. When I noticed that it was time for dinner, I didn't remember him leaving the office to make dinner. Turns out he hadn't - he was busily trying to get ONE MORE THING done.

This is a classic example of the ongoing struggle with time. Probably every one of you has more to do than time to do it. We hurry. We rush. We are absolutely convinced we can do more than one thing at a time. And, do in 5 minutes what actually takes more like 30 minutes to do. Somehow, we continually trick ourselves into believing that we can get it all done.

There is nothing to do about time. Time marches on, as they say. You can't manage time; you can only manage yourself. Everyone has the same amount of time in every day and, as much as we want to speed up what we do in that amount to time, there is always a limit. David is always wishing he was The Flash but even The Flash can't go fast enough to get everything done.

Here are some things you may be doing in hope of getting more time:

*Missing vacations - Because there's not enough time to stop working.

*Microwave your meals - Who can afford the time to really cook when it's so much quicker to just zap it?

*Choosing cut up frozen vegetables - Chopping that broccoli is just plain tedious.

*Limping along on 6, 5, 4, or 3 hours of sleep - Who needs repair and regeneration of the body, anyhow?

*Recess? - Get rid of it. Put those 5-year-olds to work learning something for heaven's sake!

*And using all that technology that's suppose to save us time - When not waiting on downloads, answering IMs or sleeping with our beepers, that is.

And on and on.

Keeping up with the times can deceptively keep you from the things you really want to do. Rather than being a victim of time or having time be your taskmaster, you can begin to look at how you can better manage yourself in relationship to time.

Ultimately, you are the one who gets to choose what you do in each moment of time in each day. When you choose to do something, you are simultaneously choosing not to do many other things. That simple fact often escapes our conscious recognition. So choose wisely.

When David chooses to get ONE MORE THING done, he is also choosing to forget about our exercise and accept the natural consequences of that choice. Which is me being upset :)

The first step to managing yourself in relationship to time is to keep reminding yourself that you are in charge of your actions. You can break the grip that ticking time has over you. You can chose for yourself and stop getting caught up in tyranny of the clock. You can manage yourself and give up trying to manage time.

" You are in the driver's seat of your life and can point your life down any road you want to travel. You can go as fast or as slow as you want to go … and you can change the road you're on at any time." --Jinger Heath