How to Have Time for What Matters Most

Summer is officially here and if you’re a teacher, you may feel like I used to…. that your time away from the classroom is precious…. almost too precious. You want to use this time in the best possible way, and not reach the end of your summer with regret about that thing you really wanted to accomplish but never got around to doing.

Teachers are not alone in having a limited allotment of time. We all have only so many hours in a day, days in a week, weeks in a year. I’m not in the classroom anymore and I still feel the anxiety of summer going by too fast and not having time to do all I had hoped to.

So how do we use this limited time well and stop feeling pressured by its preciousness?

I believe this quote by Courtney Carver holds the key! That’s why I wrote it where I’d see it several times a day – just to remind myself!

“If you don’t have time to do what matters, stop doing things that don’t.”

The truth is, we don’t have time to do everything we want to do. But we do have time to do what’s most important. And what’s most important is a moving target…. it keeps changing.

So ask yourself what really matters to you. What’s most important now? Then make sure you do that. 

A lot of the things we fill our time with really don’t matter that much in the long run. So let those go and focus on the thing(s) that your future self will look back on and thank you for!