Come on, say it with me, “I do not have enough time in the day to get everything done, and I definitely do not have enough time in the day to do that for you.” Let’s be honest with ourselves, this is something that we have all said at one point or another, some more than others, and we have definitely used it as an excuse when someone has asked us to do something for them, right? Of course we have.

It is not a case of we do not have enough time, it is an excuse we use because it makes us sound like we are so important, so busy that we need 48 hours in a day to get everything done. What it really comes down to is good time management and setting priorities and executing on them. Everyone has a finite amount of time in a day (24 hours) and everyone has a finite amount of time in those 24 hours that they can actually be productive (some of us have more than others, but there is a breaking point for everyone, and it is no where near 24 hours). So if there is a finite amount of time in the day and a finite amount of time that you can be productive, then it stands to reason that whatever it is that you have to accomplish in that time frame gets assigned some sort of priority. If something is important enough, it gets assigned a higher priority and gets accomplished. If it is deemed not as important as the most important, but more important that the least important, it falls somewhere in the middle and the likelihood that it gets accomplished is somewhere over 50 % (these are estimates that I have pulled out of thin air for illustrative purposes, so take them with a huge grain of salt, but you get what I am saying here). The less the priority, the less likely that it will get accomplished that day, that is not to say that it will never get accomplished, after all, there is always tomorrow. It just gets thrown back into the mix of things that need to get accomplished tomorrow and reassigned a priority. Maybe this time it will get accomplished, maybe not. The good thing is that the cycle start a new with every new day, the bad news is that sometimes certain things keep getting pushed off until they are no longer deemed even remotely important and therefore never get accomplished.

So the next time that you tell someone I just did not have enough time in the day to do that for you, tell them the truth, it was not a high enough of a priority for you to do that day, sorry.