A reality check, cured my time, money issues

(Random Trails)

If you effectively connect the dots, you may get your solutions in life. I know I did, for something that had been plaguing me for some time. But I didn’t know I had a problem, you see. Like many of you I thought I knew all I needed to about the issue in question and went about merrily.
You see folks, what you see manifesting as challenges in your lives are usually just symptoms of real issues. Real problems and challenges are often deeper seated that what meets the eye. And if you are serious about improving the quality of yourself, your conduct and just your general personal effectiveness, you need to be able to search yourself and go to the bottom of your being, turning every stone in a quest to comb out mediocrity and emerge with a higher standard of yourself.

In my own quest to be better, bigger and more, it took me a long time to “diagnose” a challenge I had and let alone to connect that two of my seemingly unrelated “problems” were, in fact, from one root cause.
Time and money. What do they have in common?

Like many people I know, I had always had challenges keeping time to the minute.  While most people will shrug this off as an “African thing” invoking that whole, “No, hurry in Africa we are two hours ahead of the Greenwich Meridian!” mantra; or that it is a “woman thing” —women always take too long to leave the house or leave the mirror kind of thinking.  But you know what peeps, being habitually late should never be condoned. It’s most unbecoming, unprofessional and downright offensive and insulting to those who must wait for you to finally make your appearance. After I discovered the courtesy of calling in ahead to alert colleagues that I would be running late I then clutched onto that and started using it as all-lateness-covered blanket excuse. Which, really it shouldn’t be. Alerting people ahead of time that I would be running late, while it didn’t leave people in the dark about my whereabouts, can only go so far.  In itself, it does not take away from the fact that you are not there at the time that you are expected to be somewhere.

On the other hand, managing my finances had also always been somewhat of a tall order.  Whether in surplus or deficit, I would never quite get it down to a science. I would always be drowning in brokenness even when I earned bags and bags of money.
Until I made my breakthrough!
Reading one day, I can across somewhere where they explained that the relationship you have with money is the same relationship you have with time. I set out to prove it, and in so doing I unlocked the root cause of what had been plaguing me for years.

Time and money — what do they have in common?  They are both resources, darn it. Valuable resources — both of which are always in limited supply.

In my case even if I started out with plenty of time to prepare to go somewhere I would  always end up being late. Even if I started out with a purseful of money I would always run out. This is what I discovered in my   personal journey: I was so unrealistic about these resources and the allocations thereof. If I needed to be somewhere at 10am and if I   had woken up at 6 am, I would end up still being late. I would find something else to do either read, write or whatever and leave an hour to prepare. It took some time to figure out  that the hour was not enough. I was guilty of always under-allocating the resource. I obviously needed more than the hour to prepare. And I needed my allocations to be evidence-based, informed by my regular practice of how   much time I really needed. Not to guess or   fumble about in the dark, when I could ascertain for sure. I inflated my own speed of doing things, I under-estimated the actual time it took to do something. For years I lied to myself that I took 20 minutes to bath, when in reality I   took longer. In much the same way I would unrealistically set aside some money for a certain something which was too little anyway, and consider the rest of the amount as monies I could commit elsewhere. I had to be realistic about monies I needed to plan for and functions and items I needed to include and allocate for.  So in other words when it came to my money and my time I had items I was not realistically reflecting on the budget lines. While these items woud be silent on the budget, they would be real in terms of the resources they actually consumed. So I had silent and invisible consumers of time and money I was not capturing and reflecting. And because my budgeting of this was off, it would always offset me.
I wasn’t real. I needed to be real.

In all of that here is what I learned: 1. When it comes to money and time, be realistic about the needs and allocate accordingly. 2. Learn to account for all of it. Do not have some that trickle down the drain or that you do from the back door or side door. 3. If you respect time, chances are you respect money. 4. If you are careless with time, you will also be careless with money. 5. If you take care of time and money they will take care of you.
Take the time, dear reader, to see whether or not this is also true in your own life.

To take it a notch higher some people say that time is money. Value one, value the other.  Value both.

In any case, when it comes to personal effectiveness, punctuality and effective management of your finances are critical components which you cannot afford to be tardy about.  I may not be where I want to get to yet, but I am happy to say that since my Aha! moment I am well on my way to better management of the two resources. Without a doubt!
– E-mail: maggiemzumara@yahoo.ie  Follow on Twitter on magsmzumara