Tell me your goals and how you spend your time, and I'm pretty sure I could predict with 90+% accuracy whether or not you'll achieve them. How you spend your time reveals how much you value your goal.
In 2007 under the tutelage of Coach Weir, I was training pretty hard for the Olympic Trials in 2008. I believed that I was working hard, I was telling everyone who would listen about my goal, and I was skipping practice to stay at work about 3 out of 5 days per week. I improved a little that year, but needless to say, nowhere near how much I needed to improve in order to be a real contender for a spot on the Olympic team, competing against women who trained full time. In reality, despite what I was thinking and saying, it was more important for me to earn money and start my career than it was to train for the Olympics two years out.
Thankfully, I was coached by a very smart man, and before we began the final year of training leading up to the trials he sat me down and asked me to tell him about my priorities. As I recall after some thought I wrote training, family, work, and friends, in that order. I was hard pressed to order them, because how do you say in black and white that your training comes before your family? The particularly eye-opening part came when he said, ok, now if your priorities really were in that order - training, family, work, friends - would you still be making the day to day choices that you are making now?
Truth be told, my priorities really were in that order at that point (I would have probably quit my job if they had said I couldn't train), but I was allowing external demands on me, primarily the needs of my company, to dictate how I spent my time, and it showed. My career was progressing and my hammer throwing was flailing. My relationship with my family wasn't particularly impacted by my training, other than my physical proximity being so far removed, and I'd never had much time with friends. Problem identified, we immediately we began discussing the changes I needed to make in my mindset and my schedule in order to be successful, and that very day I was able to begin a sincere quest to earn an Olympic spot. I started working harder throughout the day, enabling me to leave work on time, and I didn't get fired. I trained much more consistently, and I improved all but 90cm of how much I needed to improve. In the end, I didn't make it, but I believe I truly did everything within my power to do so, and I rest easily knowing that.
I've reflected on this concept multiple times in my life since, and thankfully the exercise continues to help me structure my time in a way that I am able to progress in reaching my goals. Now as I hope to earn a spot to the CrossFit Games, I can only put my family behind my training for short periods of time before those relationships suffer more than I'm willing to accept. Sometimes I have to be late to CrossFit because it's more important to talk to my mom. Sometimes I have to put CrossFit on the backburner because I need to put my job first. Thankfully, gone are the days when I do these things without recognizing that how I spend my time affects which of my goals I achieve. Any time I begin to lose my bearings I stop to assess what I'm trying to accomplish, and I double check that my schedule is in line.
I'm grateful to Coach Weir for many things, but this lesson may have been the most important of all. How you spend your time is directly correlated to which of your goals you will achieve, and how you spend your time is one of the few things in life you can control.
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