Monday Motivation | Reclaiming My Time

I looked up and it was August, just like that. I don’t know where the time has gone or how quickly we got here, but it seems like I was just celebrating New Years, while setting a list of new goals to accomplish before the year was up. Luckily, I’ve crushed a lot of them already, even with the random additions I felt were necessary; but I can’t deny the fact that I feel like the past seven months were a complete blur.

My brand and business has taken off exponentially this year. In January I made plans to elevate them both but failed to accurately measure how well they both would do. Your brand growing past what you expected isn’t necessarily a bad problem to have, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a lot of work. Unlike most bloggers, I never had the desire to blog full-time and even still, don’t plan to be a full-time entrepreneur any time soon. My career has always been important to me, so I’ve found ways to balance both the best I could. I’ve done well with balancing, but naturally when your focus is split nothing gets 100% of your efforts. Every day when I wake up I have to prioritize which parts of my life I need to focus on that day and while it’s effective, it’s often unfair.

Helping others, women specifically, has always been the purpose of this site and my brand. I take pride in the fact that I’m able to do so as often as I do because that’s all I wanted to come from launching a blog. Prior to offering any product or service, I was already sacrificing a lot of my time making sure that I had content for this site. Believe me, I understand the necessity of sacrifice when you’re trying to build something you haven’t had before, but I changed my whole life around to carve out the time I needed in order to handle all the things on my plate. I hadn’t allowed myself to sleep past 7 am on a Saturday at all this year because I so desperately need Saturdays and Sundays to get work done. Last week I was unable to post anything on the blog because I’d picked up some new projects at work and needed my evenings to complete the brand audits I had scheduled. I’ve said no to outings with my friends, brunch with my family and date nights with my boyfriend because I’ve had to work on something that I created for myself. We all long to do something we’re so passionate about that we jump out of bed in the mornings to get to it and I’m blessed to have that, but I have to remind myself that my time is still mine to spend any way I please.

Balance went from juggling priorities to feeling like I was being pulled in a dozen different directions without a moment for myself. So guess what? Like sister Maxine Waters has preached, I’m reclaiming my time. I want to get back to the things I loved doing before I was servicing anyone else. If I’m not being fueled creatively, I have nothing left to teach anyone. Before the year is up, I’m setting new goals to make sure I have the time to do the things that are most important to me, like content creation, more visual interaction and new projects at my 9 to 5. Before I was prioritizing helping others before helping myself, or before when I was building my own brand, before helping others was prioritized over helping myself and when I was only juggling 10 things instead of 20. There are so many other things that I’m passionate about and want to do that I have not gotten the chance to because I’ve been so tied up with helping others.

This Monday, reclaim your time. Don’t be afraid to drop the guilt trip and get back to focusing on what best serves you. Beyond all of your responsibilities, errands and deadlines, your time is still yours. You can adjust it at any moment of any day. You can say no and you can change your mind. You can rearrange what you want to give your attention to. Consider some things you’re currently dealing with that aren’t worthy of your time and don’t look back.