How many things are there on your list of things to do “eventually”?

I am not talk­ing about gro­cery shop­ping or laun­dry, or call­ing your neighbor.

I am talk­ing about all those things that you want to change around the house.
All those things that you really want to make, or paint, or draw, or knit, or sew, or build, or sculpt…
you name it.
All those things you want to cre­ate, that are very clear in your mind.
All the things you want to learn! A new lan­guage, a new pro­gram, dance, instru­ment, work­out, skill…
And the chal­lenges you want to start, like train­ing for a marathon, writ­ing or draw­ing more, eat­ing healthy, or train­ing for pub­lic speaking…

Really, how long is your list? How long have these things been on it?
And what are you wait­ing for to start?

There is no time…

After doing what you need to do – the work that pays the bills (that I hope you love), tak­ing care of the fam­ily and kids if you have any, mak­ing din­ner, answer­ing some emails, show­er­ing and tak­ing care of your­self and your health – you are tired and the day is over before you know it.
Every now and then, you think of that list of things you would like to do, and feel bad because you ‘don’t have time’.

Pri­or­i­tize your dream list

What you should do first is revisit your list and pri­or­i­tize the things you want to do or learn.

Some­times you’d read an arti­cle or watch a movie that gets you totally obsessed with a cer­tain skill or activ­ity. For months, I have thought of tak­ing sword fight­ing classes after watch­ing Kill Bill (Uma Thur­man is more gra­cious than a bal­le­rina…), and learn­ing Swedish after falling in love with Lisa Ekdahl’s song Benen I Kors. But I got over this even­tu­ally. I didn’t give up; I rec­og­nized the pass­ing obses­sion. I would like to know how to han­dle a sword, and speak Swedish, but it’s not really impor­tant for me right now.
I ended up watch­ing some videos about sword fight­ing and read­ing about Swe­den, and remov­ing the to-learn’s from my list.

Baby steps

After clean­ing up your list, you can start with baby steps.
If you have kids, or an irreg­u­lar sched­ule, you prob­a­bly can’t com­mit to spend­ing two hours every day paint­ing or learn­ing span­ish, no mat­ter how dis­ci­plined you try to be. But can’t you find chunks of 10 min­utes here and there to do your thing? You would think it’s not worth it and that you can’t have any­thing done in 10 min­utes. But isn’t 10 min­utes bet­ter than noth­ing? You can learn 5 new Span­ish words in 10 min­utes, do 50 squats and 50 crunches, or draw the rough out­line of that new children’s book char­ac­ter you had in mind. (You can’t swim or hike in chunks of 10 minutes, so stick to the other things on your list for now…)

It takes a while to con­vince your­self that 10 min­utes will make a dif­fer­ence, but I dare you to try.
And before you go, read these moti­vat­ing words and quotes that I gath­ered on Pin­ter­est, in my Words board.

The secret to a happy mind

Actions will get you there

If you don’t start now, then when?

There is no such thing as per­fect conditions

Know what you are and be good at it

The power of your thoughts

I will bike for 20 min­utes today. What will you do? ☮