The problem with ‘one day’ things

Can you believe we’re in the last month of the first quarter of the year already??? I’m not sure if you felt it too, but for me, January felt like it was 497 days long and February felt like it lasted 3 minutes 😂

​I wanted to talk to you about time in this blog post because time is one of the few things in our lives that we can’t make more of. It’s a finite thing. Once time is gone, we can’t get it back.

​When I speak with people who would love to travel but don’t, one of the top reasons they tell me is that they’re too busy. They don’t have enough time. They’re too busy to plan it. They don’t have enough time to work out when to go and then book all the things. All the options feel overwhelming and like it will just take too long to organise. So they don’t. It becomes a ‘one day’ thing. They’ll get to it ‘one day’.

​The problem with ‘one day’ things, is that you keep putting them off and keep putting them off until all of a sudden 5 years have passed and you wake up and realise that you’re still in that same place you were 5 years ago except 1,826 ‘one days’ have gone by and it’s all time that you’ll never get back, that you’ll never get to do anything else with.

​Now, I realise this is probably making some of you very mad at me right now because quite often when people say this it’s followed by the completely unhelpful ‘if it’s important to you, you’ll make the time!’ or my personal fave ‘start getting up at 5am and you’ll get everything done!’

​Don’t get me wrong, if waking up at 5am works for you, awesome, keep it up, more power to you, live your best life. But for a good portion of us it doesn’t. Neither does ‘you’ll make the time!’ because if we were able to do that a. things wouldn’t get relegated to a ‘one day’ pile and b. we’d be out there making good cash money as time travellers which would also solve our travel problem 😂​

Believe me, I get it. I’ve spent many a year putting things in the ‘one day’ pile myself and I still do that sometimes now. People presume that because I’m single and childfree I magically have all this extra time on my hands but I don’t. I’m running my own business, which can very easily fill my days plus I have a chronic condition that affects my eyes and when I have a flare up, I can go whole days without being able to do anything because I will have double or sometimes even triple vision.​

What I have learned though, is how to organise the time I do have better, so that I have a 15 – 30 minute block somewhere in my day to work on ‘just for me’ things. It took some rearranging when I first did this, but when I found what worked for me, it actually solved two problems:

1. Booking my dream trips was no longer overwhelming because I had to break everything down into smaller chunks in order to fit it into my 15 – 30 minute block. I did small tasks every day, like booking one hotel or researching a particular area so it never got too much.
2. All of these little actions eventually added up to an entire trip being booked. This meant things stopped spending 1,826 days or more in my ‘one day’ pile and I was actually doing the things I’d long dreamed of doing.

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If you’re not sure where to get started to do this for yourself, have a look at what you’re spending time on each day. Write down every single thing you do. Chances are when you do and you can see the big picture, you’ll be able to find somewhere you can slot this time in or a way to reorganise your schedule that will mean you can fit your ‘just for me’ time in. Even if you have to start with just 5 minutes a day, keep in mind that lots of little actions eventually add up to big progress and you can actually get a lot done in 5 minutes.

​If you do that and still feel like you can’t find even 5 minutes, try going one step further and see if there are tasks you are doing that you can batch together. When I started creating little task buckets, where I grouped together similar tasks, e.g. answering emails and DMs, and scheduled them into a ‘bucket’ of time on my calendar, it was an absolute game changer for me.

​These two time strategies have been absolute game changers for my clients too. Watching the overwhelm they were feeling just melt away and the realisation that the trip they’ve always wanted to take is actually within reach is amazing and one of my favourite parts about what I do 😄​

If you want a little bit more in depth help with finding that elusive 15 – 30 minutes in your schedule or you have another burning travel question, why not book one of my 15 minute Ask a Travel Coach chats (and yes, I see the irony in asking you to spend 15 minutes to find 15 more minutes, but sometimes you just need someone else’s perspective!). They’re completely free and are absolutely not a sales call. You’ll leave with the answers to your questions and no pressure or obligation to do anything else. The time we spend together is focussed entirely on you and the questions I can answer for you in that 15 minutes. You can book your 15 minute chat here: https://tidycal.com/bucketlisttravelcoaching/free15​

​​Remember, the only trip you’ll regret is the one you don’t take.