steve.blog

I hate "I don't have time". It should be banned. It's used all the time and it's rarely true.

"I don't have time" normally means one of 2 things:

• You have other priorities that you'd prefer to do instead
• You probably think you're saving time be skipping something important now, but you'll end up paying for it later

Owning an old house means that I have a constant list of DIY jobs to do. Often I don't get as much done as I'd like. I could say "I don't have time" but that's simply not true. It tends to be "I could do that, but I'd rather go out for dinner".

The second example mostly crops up for me in development work. People say they don't have time to test or create proper application structure. They then proceed and spend 3 times longer with loads more stress hacking and debugging a unwieldy application.

People like "I don't have time" because it shifts responsibility. The world is obviously giving you too many things to do.

So here's the bottom line: get over yourself and think about whether you really "don't have the time".

You're either prioritising something else - which is fine - or your prioritising the wrong thing - which means you need to take a step back and decide on what's really important.