Managing Your Commitments

Have you ever been in that situation when you made a commitment, a promise that you weren’t able to fulfill? How does it feel when you can’t do what you said you would?

Most of us don’t ever want to let anyone down, we never want to see that look on someone’s face or hear that sound in their voice when they’ve been disappointed. Yet we continue to overextend ourselves.

Why?

We don’t know that we’re over committed.

We can’t say no.

We think we’re Wonder Woman.

We want everyone to like us.

I’m sure there are plenty more reasons we can come up with and you should definitely try to determine why you specifically might run into challenges with keeping your commitments so you can address that root cause.

I did an exercise a couple years back that I continue to do on a semi-annual basis to keep myself focused on what I really want to be committed to:

• Take a few minutes and write down all the people, organizations and projects you are committed to. Then, next to each of them, write down the amount of time each of these commitments take up, this can be done by week or by month.
• Total up all the hours to see if the time spent is realistic, in other words, if your commitments total up 140 hours in a week there’s no way you can do that unless you’re sleeping less than 3 hours a night.
• Now number them with #1 being the commitment you enjoy the most, feel most compelled to keep or must keep because of your position either in your family or your business. Every commitment should have a number.
• Start with the highest number and begin to create your plan to remove those commitments one at a time. Send the email, make the phone call but do it as soon as possible because there isn’t any turning back. Get control of time and how you spend it, as it is the one thing you will never get back.