5 Fresh Tips to Help You Reclaim Your Time with Life Coach Abby Furey

Learning how to reclaim your time can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to reclaim your time with life coach Abby Furey.

In her private practice, Sincerely with Abby Furey, Abby offers Life Coaching and Business Mentoring services. She helps women stop waiting for things to slow down - because they never do - and take control of their time and priorities now, while they’re living their full and precious lives. Additionally, she supports small businesses through monthly and quarterly business strategy sessions, providing structure to business foundations and progress.

You can learn more about Abby Furey on her Fresh Starts profile.

5 Fresh Tips to help you reclaim your time:

1. Prioritize: it's not breaking news, but it bears repeating - everything cannot matter at all times. If you try to make everything matter, you will do nothing well and you'll most likely be miserable. The best way I've found to bring clarity around priorities is to 1. get specific about your current season of life and 2. keep your time horizon short. 3 months tops. I might ask you to tell me about your season of life by asking questions about the ages and stages of the people and activities that make up your days. What is the rhythm of your life? What are you walking through right now? Our season is always changing, so do what you can to sum it up in a few sentences. Through this exercise, get curious about themes. Are you focused on growth? Rest? Replenishing? Is a time of crisis or extreme support of another? Name it and allow the priority to rise to the top.

2. Plan: when it comes to time, you should always start with a plan. I'll spend the rest of my days shouting from the rooftops that structuring your time is the key to unlocking time freedom and making space for what matters most to you. I know it may sound counterintuitive. A plan for your time and tasks serves as home base. It is not rigid and bossy, but supportive and functional. When we get off track, as we are bound to do, the plan serves as the familiar road to come back to. This is also why routines and rituals can be so comforting during times of transition and difficult seasons. Repeated patterns and sequences can serve as solid ground to stand on and remind us we have control and agency in these moments of our day.

3. Prepare: this tip probably qualifies as the most "hack-y" of the group. It is where we remind ourselves to tend to things before they become urgent, and to care for our future selves by filling the coffee maker the night before. But allow me to make the connection to your time. Moving away from living in urgency is a necessary gift we can only give to ourselves. When we tend to the necessary before it is urgent, we are relieving future stress, worry, disappointment and plenty of overnight UPS charges! Here is another way preparation can help you reclaim time. When your time and your priorities are aligned, you will experience more opportunities for work flow sessions, staying closer to deadlines and creating efficiencies that you would overlook if you were stuck in catch up mode. It's powerful stuff.  So yeah, fill your coffee maker tonight.

4. (Be) Present: there's no way around it, we have to take ourselves off auto-pilot to reclaim our time and feel better about our days. Distraction rules our lives and no matter our intentions, it is not serving us. Research shows that adults are not focused on what they are doing 50% of the time. Researchers also asked subjects how they were feeling during those times. Results were definitive that people are less happy when distracted. I've yet to meet someone who said they are ok with missing half of what is happening in their lives. And yet here we are. Be where your feet are. Pick your head up. And my best tip for staying present: always have a notebook nearby. When your genius idea for a preschool fundraiser comes up in the middle of finalizing tomorrow's leadership retreat, jot it down, and get right back to the task at hand, or at plan.

5. Protect: finally, be a fierce protector of your time. To the extent to which you have privilege and resources to do so, enforce limits and boundaries that support your priorities. There are so many threats to our time (you're most likely listening to me on one of the worst offenders). Phones, perfectionism, procrastination, and productivity to name a few (that play nicely with the alliteration of the day). If you truly want to reclaim your time for what matters most to you right now, you are going to have to implement some time boundaries. Try running a new request through this filter: would I say yes to this if I had to do it today? We all operate under the false belief that we will have more time in the future than we have today. Have you ever known this to be true? I encourage you to start small. Start where you are. If having a consistent routine with your daughter is a priority for you right now, and you plan to get her off the bus most days, let that ritual be where you start reclaiming your time. Give it a name - "Bus Break" or "Mom Time." Any time you give something a name you make it matter. Those 10 minutes can be enough. Over time, you will notice that you are spending more and more of your day with intention and in alignment with your priorities. This feeling is available to you.