I've been thinking hard about how to tackle the "I have no time" problem I keep facing. There's so much I want to do and have to do, yet I always feel there aren't enough hours — a problem I've carried for a very long time.

First, a recap of the well-known time-management techniques

The time-management techniques you commonly come across are these.

And yet, I couldn't keep any of it up

I too have read many time-management books and watched plenty of YouTube videos. I actually tried them, but I could never keep them going for long. I'd never thought deeply about why I failed. Perhaps I'd resigned myself to "I just have no staying power."

Reflecting again in light of what I researched this time, I think the causes were that I demanded too much perfection of myself — feeling I had to do everything exactly by the rules — and that I engaged half-heartedly, without understanding the essence of each technique.

Three realizations I reached by digging into my failures

So I thought hard about the reasons for my past failures. And I arrived at the following realizations.

Realization ① I hadn't even done the "inventory"

The first was that I hadn't fully laid out everything I have to do and everything I actually want to do. What surprised me, thinking it over again, was how vague and utterly unspecified my "wants" were.

Over decades of being run ragged by housework, part-time jobs, and child-rearing, with barely any time of my own, I'd lost track of what I even wanted to do — and that shocked me. I can think of endless things I don't want to do but have to, yet I don't know what I truly want. That, I think, was a state that pulled me away from happiness.

Unless I carefully lay out and list both my "have-tos" and my "wants" without missing any, I can't even set priorities — such an obvious thing, and I'd failed to notice it.

There are surely many mothers and fathers today who are run ragged by work, housework, and child-rearing and can't do what they want. I hope you won't end up like me, forgetting even what it was you wanted to do. Since the end of February 2026 I've joined Libecity and have been studying money little by little; and I've come to feel that, just like money, it's vital to grasp your current situation with time and manage it well.

Realization ② A strange guilt about doing what I want

The second was noticing that I've always had a tendency to feel a strange guilt about doing what I want when there's so much I ought to be doing.

When making a to-do list and setting priorities with technique ①, I — like many people — tend to get chased by the "urgent." But I learned how important it is to hold the view that deliberately turning your attention to what's important-but-not-urgent leads to your own future happiness. I don't think I'd ever had the perspective of positioning "what I want to do" as something "important but not urgent."

We're born to be happy — so it's only natural that being endlessly chased by "shoulds" turns you into a kind of living corpse.

Realization ③ The habit of blaming my "circumstances"

The third realization was that, even when I had things I wanted to do, I'd convinced myself I couldn't do them because some particular environment or situation was getting in the way.

I could see that I'd fallen into the habit of making excuses, rather than thinking in terms of "it starts with me." And I realized that the habit of blaming everything on those around me and my circumstances carries the danger of damaging my relationships with the people near me. Since we each carry our own wants and shoulds and relate to one another within that, a self-centered, blame-others mindset is nothing but selfish and willful.

If your environment or situation truly is in the way, then persistently searching for an alternative plan to make what you want happen is the healthier, more constructive path — that's a conviction I managed to make truly sink in. Even what seems like a dead end, if you keep pursuing it without giving up, will often reveal an unexpected way through.

What I've decided to work on, based on these realizations

This time, to solve the troubles I carry, I wrote about the things I looked into, the things I've tried, and the things I'm doing.

Living really does throw one new enemy at you after another, enough to wear you down. Looking back, I always gave up from the start, deciding it was impossible — the idea of fighting and defeating the enemy never even occurred to me. Even when I got useful information from books or YouTube, I mostly never put it into practice. If a quick try didn't work, I'd say "this is useless!" without ever considering that maybe it was my way of doing it that was off.

Based on these realizations, here's what I've decided to work on to fix my "I have no time" problem:

And all of this I've decided to approach without rushing, without aiming for perfection, and with enjoyment. I've also decided to keep my plans from being too tight, so I can recover quickly even when things don't go as planned.

Also, the "things you can do in 5 or 30 minutes" list from the first half works nicely as concrete examples for item ⑤'s "things to do in spare moments." Good for beating drowsiness and for making the most of time — two birds with one stone.

In closing

Undoing bad habits and thought patterns soaked in over 50-plus years won't be easy, I know. But without giving up, and without rushing, I want to keep improving little by little. Until now I've repeated the cycle of demanding too much perfection and giving up, or bottling up stress by denying myself what I wanted, then swinging the other way — neglecting my have-tos to do only what I liked, and then blaming myself for it.

But from now on, with these methods, I hope to balance both my wants and my have-tos well, and make life an enjoyable one. I'll be glad if my realizations are of some use to someone. Thank you so much for reading to the end 🍎