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So the dialogue goes something like this: ” I don’t have time.”

People hurt my reply to this which is: “Everybody has the same amount of time. 24 hours in a day. Oprah does not have more time than you or me. That’s the only thing I have in common with her, by the way.” The other person usually says, ” well, Oprah has money and I don’t.” I say, ” if this were the case, you still would not have more time but maybe you might carve out your day differently.”

I understand what the person above is trying to say though. I think what they’re trying to say is that sometimes they feel overwhelmed and it’s hard to figure out how to carve out their day. I think figuring out how to divide 24 hours each day is a real challenge that does sometimes seem insurmountable. There are real pressures. There are people relying on us. We want to earn money or have time for ourselves.

People argue with me when I tell them that it is unfair to blame time or their situations for their perception that they do not have time. On the one hand, we need to accept that priorities can change every day and things almost always take more time than we think.

Where blame lies is controversial and I’m not sure it is important to get too caught up in it. What I think we might agree on is whose responsibility it is to make every second of every day mean something positive. From now on, shift your thinking from “how can I get more time?”, to “how can I manage the important things in my life today?”

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