Tips & Tricks

“There’s only so much time in a day.” 

This thought crosses your mind as you open up an email for yet another fundraising event. You want to help, but you’re already overbooked and overwhelmed. What can you do?

The truth is even though you may want to help out everyone in any way you can, there just isn’t enough hours in a day. 

So, how can we do our best to help others without adding to our already jam-packed schedules?

You can’t say yes to everything

“Time is our most valuable currency.” – Adam Holtzer 

It’s what we do with it that determines our success.

Every second that you spend elsewhere is a second away from working on your goals. By giving away our time too freely, we hinder our own progress.

Steve Jobs once said that “It’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” 

You want to get involved and help out these charitable causes, but is it worth stripping valuable time away from your goals? From your family? That’s for you to decide.

Luckily, there are ways to help without spending hours of your valuable time. It’s just about doing things a bit differently…

Saying yes without saying yes

People come to you asking you for help, but you know you can’t keep giving away your time. There’s another way. 

Usually, someone comes to you asking for a specific type of help. But they don’t tell you why they need help in the first place.

Once you’ve figured out why they’ve asked you for help, you’ll be able to discover other ways of helping them besides time. These ways may actually be better help than what the person had originally asked you to do.

Maybe you’re a public relations expert. Instead of donating time like they asked, you could help the charity get an article published in a well-known publication. In this example, you’d be helping the charity in a bigger way, spreading their message to a wider audience, and would not have to spend as much time.

This doesn’t only apply to charity either. Anytime someone asks you for help in any sort of way, get to the root of why they need help. Then, you’ll be able to deliver better help.

Saying yes without saying yes is helping the cause, just not in the way you were asked. Some ways you can say yes without saying yes are…

• Connecting to someone who could be help more than you could
• Dedicate your services to the cause
• Establish that you can donate some time, but not as much as they had asked
• Spread the word about their cause throughout your social networks.

We all want to help but we can’t give our time away to everyone. 

If we can get to the root of why someone is asking for your time, you may be able to help them in other ways – better ways they had never even thought of.

Once you know the end in mind, you can give different and better help.