I’m frustrated by the expression “I don’t have time”. As my friends and I have gotten older, I’ve been hearing it more and more frequently. I’ve even caught myself using when trying to come up with an excuse when coordinating evening or weekend plans.

The reason I dislike the phrase is that it’s equivalent to saying “it’s not a priority” and yet we phrase it such that we convince ourselves it’s something outside our control rather than due to the choices we make. I could go out until 3 AM if I make that a priority over running 6 miles in the morning before heading to work just like I could go catch a movie instead of working on a side project. If we expressed our choices in terms of priorities rather than time we’d be more likely to deal with them.

Life is full of constraints and it’s impossible to do everything we want. This will only get worse as we get older and deal with more “grown-up” things. Better to develop the right mindset now rather than realize it later.