Introduction
If you are trying to make changes to live a more intentional life, you need to find ways to focus on personal growth no matter how busy your schedule gets.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to work on self-improvement with a hectic schedule. Indeed, when requested why they do not work out more, people often respond, “I do not have time“.
Of course, life can be overwhelming. However, if you want to transform it, you need to make time for personal growth.
This post on how to focus on personal growth despite a hectic schedule will help you make time for self-development no matter how busy you are.
Let’s start, shall we?
Plan your days
This one might seem like a no-brainer, but many people still do not plan their days to ensure they make the most out of them and have time to focus on personal growth.
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If you want to be more productive and have time to focus on yourself daily, you must ensure you use your time wisely.
You would be surprised how much time you can waste between activities. These precious minutes will add up at the end of the day, let alone at the end of the week, month or year!
Including personal growth activities in your daily to-do list will help you ensure you take time for yourself.
Personal growth activities will often considerably improve your mental health. Hence, personal growth is not a luxury but rather a necessity.
Adding activities such as reading, breathing exercises, and physical activities into your daily schedules will help you be more positive and increase your overall motivation to get things done.
Limit distractions
Having a daily schedule is not enough to ensure you actually get things done.
Indeed, a lot of people claim they do not have enough time to work on themselves while also spending countless hours per week on social media and Netflix.
Limiting distraction is the easiest way to make time to work on personal goals.
How many hours do you spend weekly on your phone, laptop, tablet, or watching TV? Probably more than 5 hours…
- Working out 5 hours per week is enough to lose weight and get fit
- Practicing 5 hours per week is enough to learn a new instrument
- And it is also enough to learn a new language or skill.
Once you identify how you are currently wasting time, you can easily replace your “bad” habits with positive habits that will support your personal growth and goals.
Identifying the habits you need to break will be crucial to rethinking your daily schedule and transforming your life.
To do so, using a screen time app can be really helpful since most of us do not realize how much time spent on our phones compounds at the end of the week.
Limiting distractions is a really effective way to make time to focus on personal growth.
Automate/outsource some parts of your life
Automating or outsourcing some parts of your life, especially activities that add little to no value, will help you make time for your personal growth and goals.
I used to spend countless hours every week cleaning around the house until I realized that doing so while having a full-time job and going to College was not sustainable.
I had to find a system to help me balance it all and found out that implementing a cleaning routine and using a timer is all it takes to be more efficient.
If you don’t want to do it yourself, you can still outsource it and hire someone but note that this is not mandatory. You can still do it yourself and save time.
If you implement an efficient cleaning schedule you can do everything yourself, save a lot of money, and still have time to focus on personal growth.
Here are the chores you need to add to your cleaning schedule and their ideal frequency:
Your finances can also be automated to save you a lot of time. Here are simple activities you can perform to do so:
- Pay all your bills online
- Automate recurring payments
- Automate your debt repayments
- Automate your savings
Automating your finances will not only help you improve your financial situation, but it will also help you build wealth and get out of debt faster!
Implement routines
If you have read any other posts on this site, you already know how much I love routines.
Implementing a morning and night routine has totally transformed my life.
Routines are great because they can turn any activity into a habit really quickly. Can you imagine working on your goals daily on autopilot?
Well, a good routine will help you achieve that in no time!
Routines, when followed on a daily basis, have the power to transform our lives in a couple of months.
If you haven’t routines in place yet, you should definitely start with a morning and night routine.
These 2 routines will help you implement healthy rituals to structure your days around your goals.
A morning routine is the best way to kick-start the day and stay productive.
After crushing your daily goals, your night routine will help you unwind and get prepared for a good night of sleep.
Need some inspiration to implement your first routines? These posts will help you!
Do not underestimate the power of routines. Implementing a daily routine including activities that support your goals is the easiest way to achieve them.
Rethink the timing
Sometimes the reason you do not achieve goals is not the habits you implement but their timing.
Rethinking the timing of my habits helped me crush my goals way faster.
I used to struggle to work out because I would plan my workouts at 5 pm after work but would often have to work extra hours.
To me, there was nothing more frustrating than missing workouts because of work. I simply couldn’t leave work before getting everything done and would often finish too late to go to the gym.
Changing the timing of my workouts to do them during my lunch break made a huge difference in my progress.
Another simple way to ensure you work on your personal growth despite a hectic work schedule is to complete the tasks your set for the day before actually going to work.
When you have a demanding job and have to take responsibility for other people, including their mistakes, there are often a lot of things you can’t anticipate.
Getting things done before heading to work is a simple but effective way to better control your schedule and ensure you do not let work sabotage your personal growth.
Adapt your environment
Your environment has a huge impact on your daily life and habits.
We build our habits around our environment, and sometimes, making small tweaks can lead to huge changes in our daily lives.
If we take the example of working out again, a simple way to adapt your environment to this new habit and stay focused on this goal despite a heavy workload is to have a space dedicated to fitness at home.
When I wanted to lose weight, I set the goal of running 20 miles per week.
I wasted months with the following excuses:
- I don’t feel safe running in the neighborhood
- It’s getting too cold to run
- It’s probably about to rain
- I don’t feel well enough to run
- It’s getting dark outside
- Etc…
Adapting my environment by buying a treadmill solved the issue.
I started running consistently over 20 miles per week and lost 35 pounds in 3 months. Even though I now love running and hate to skip a run, I know that without a treadmill at home, I would probably run way less.
I would probably not have lost weight, or not as much, and would still be struggling to make running a daily habit.
Changing your environment will help you make habits easier to follow, which will help you save time and stick to your plans when you have a lot of things to manage.
Another positive effect of changing your environment is that it can help you quit bad habits.
If you want, for instance, to spend less time playing video games, unplugging your PlayStation after using it and putting it in a cabinet will help you use it less.
The same goes for the habit of smoking and ashtrays.
If you decide to throw away all the ashtrays you have in your house and systematically go outside when you want to smoke a cigarette, chances are that you will smoke less.
Rethinking your environment can either remove obstacles to help you focus on your goals or add obstacles to help you break bad habits.
Your environment is important to your success, this is why when trying to change your life, starting with your environment will help!
Find good lazy habits
Finding lazy habits that support your goals is another simple but effective way to stay focused on personal growth despite a busy life.
We have to accept that we will not always be motivated or have the energy to move mountains. Sometimes taking a break and spending time on the couch is perfectly acceptable.
Finding habits that do not require too much energy but still support your goals will be key to staying focused on your personal growth after a long day at work.
The goal is to avoid crashing on your couch as soon as you get home and spending the rest of the day binge-watching Netflix.
Instead, look for small habits that will support your goals despite feeling like distractions.
It can be, for instance, looking for healthy recipes on Pinterest when you try to lose weight or reading a book about self-sabotage when trying to change your mindset, or listening to a podcast about finding your purpose in life when you need a fresh start.
Sometimes small lazy, and passive habits can help you operate a mindset shift toward success.
Making sure you stay focused on your goals and personal growth even when you’re running out of energy will help you achieve your goals faster.
This is key to optimizing your time and making the most out of it.
Take breaks
Taking breaks throughout the day is often recommended to increase productivity. But did you know that taking breaks and using these precious minutes mindfully can also help you achieve balance and stay focused on personal growth?
If you want to skyrocket your productivity, you need to take advantage of breaks and use them to recenter yourself.
To do so, you need to stop spending your breaks scrolling on your phone and start using these precious minutes to refocus.
Do some breathing exercises and stretches, go for a walk, meditate, listen to a podcast or read a chapter of your favorite book.
Take breaks as an opportunity to recenter yourself on your goals.
This will help you stay motivated throughout the day. And will help you work on your goals when you get home to again avoid crashing on your couch and doing nothing for the rest of the day.
Say “No”
Not being afraid to say “No” is key to finding balance in life.
You need to decide what kind of life you want to live, set goals that support your long-term vision of the dream life, have a plan, and say “No” to everything that doesn’t go in that direction.
This is a tip you can apply to all areas of your life, including your career.
Declining everything you do not consider a priority will help you achieve balance when life gets busy.
Contrary to what you might think, saying “No” more often will not harm your career.
It will actually help you impose yourself and take more responsibility for the tasks you agree to complete.
Being able to set priorities is key to having more clarity and being successful. Do not waste your time trying to please everyone.
Time is a very limited resource, and if you want to transform your life for the better, you need to start using it wisely and set boundaries, especially at work.
Take advantage of tech
One of the easiest ways to change our lives is to use technology wisely.
Our phones are amazing tools. They can change our lives for the worse or, the better.
The key to taking advantage of today’s technology is to understand its impacts on our daily lives and how to make technology work for us instead of against us.
Spending hours on social networks admiring the lives of influencers and writing comments will not change your life.
Watching Netflix every night for 3 hours won’t change your life either.
But reaching your goals will be much easier if you find apps and sites that help you.
Using apps like Lifesum, FitOn, To-do List, and Headspace every day has been a great help in transforming my life.
Technology can help you improve your life in many ways.
For example, it can help you:
- Implement new routines
- Lose weight thanks to nutritional recommendations
- Get in shape with exercises you can do in a few minutes at home
- Reduce stress through meditation
- Etc.
Finding apps that support your goals will be key to being more effective and working on your goals despite a hectic schedule.
Make your health your priority
No matter how busy you are, if you want to be successful, you need to make your physical and mental health a priority.
Staying motivated in the long run, staying consistent, and getting things done is hard.
But it will be even harder if you are not healthy.
No matter what your goals are, staying healthy is the key to being successful.
If you want to change your life, exercising regularly, eating healthy, getting enough sleep, and finding effective and healthy ways to cope with stress should be your priority.
Being healthy will help you move mountains and stay consistent even when your life gets (too) busy.
Implementing healthy daily routines is a great way to ensure you stay balanced and take care of your health daily.
And being in good health will help you stay motivated to achieve goals even during the most stressful times.
Don’t be afraid of smart multitasking
Multitasking, when done right, can help you get things done and make time to focus on personal growth.
However, choosing wisely what activities you decide to multitask is key to staying efficient.
In general, multi-tasking is considered bad for productivity, and this is often true.
Trying to do several activities at the same time when they require a lot of attention and concentration is not a good idea.
It usually encourages mistakes and slows us down because our brain is not able to focus on two tasks at the same time. In fact, when we multitask, our brain just constantly switches from one task to another.
This effort can be exhausting and requires extra concentration. So, very often, doing two tasks at the same time only slows us down.
But in some circumstances, multitasking can be great for productivity.
Indeed, if you work from home and decide to do your laundry, turn on the dishwasher and your robot vacuum cleaner, it will not prevent you from focusing on your work.
However, it will help you get ahead of your home chores and free up time to focus on personal growth.
The same is true if you decide to listen to a podcast while you are cleaning or taking a bath.
What’s really important when multitasking is to ensure that the activities you do at the same time do not require a high level of concentration.
Final Thoughts
If you want to transform your life, you need to focus on personal growth despite your busy work schedule.
Staying focused on your personal development will help you reach your goals fast. To do so, you need to find ways to achieve work-life balance and improve your time management skills.
It will indeed help you make time to work towards your goals to create a life you’ll love.
If you’re ready to kick-start your life transformation journey, the free 62-page guide below will help you define your goals, create routines to support them, and stay motivated to actually get things done!
