Last week we discussed excuses… and how I wasn’t actually a child genius, but that’s beside the point.
Did you catch yourself using more excuses throughout your day than you thought you did? I did, although it wasn’t easy at first to notice it.
Monday went by and I hadn’t really noticed myself using any excuses. I went home that night and I wondered about this, because I knew that I surely had used some excuses, but I probably just didn’t notice them.
I reviewed my day and asked myself what I had accomplished. Well, I had gone to the gym and had a pretty good workout. I had perused some other personal finance blogs and left several comments to get some conversations going. I went to work.
I felt like I had a pretty productive day.
Then I asked myself what I had wanted to get done that day when I woke up that morning. I wanted to do all those things that I actually did do, plus write one more blog post. I asked myself why I hadn’t got that done, and immediately the excuses began to rear their ugly, monstrous, slimy faces.
I told myself that I didn’t write a post at home before work because I had run out of time. Why had I run out of time? Because I spent about 45 minutes on Facebook. I asked myself why I hadn’t written a post while at work (I have some free time at work, from time to time). I answered by saying, “I kept getting interrupted,” (no, I usually don’t talk to myself), when in reality all of those interruptions really only amounted to about 20 minutes away from my computer.
After this realization Monday night, I noticed probably 90% of my excuses throughout the week. And I got better at noticing them every day that passed.
The downside of eliminating excuses from your vernacular is that when the excuses are gone, the only thing left is the realization that you’re ultimately, completely responsible for your own actions, and what you did or didn’t get done. The upside of course is that, once you realize and accept this, you get more done and feel far more in control of your day.
