A great skill to develop for maintaining ongoing recovery and manifesting goals is knowing how to effectively manage one's time. Early in recovery, it is enough to do what is suggested by your sponsor. Once recovery has been comfortably established, people often find time to develop goals and dreams that had laid dormant during their addiction.

Scheduling New Activities

It is important to learn how to balance your time effectively so you can achieve new goals. This is also a good time to learn coping skills for dealing with stressors. If you desire career advancement, you may need to advance your education. If you are looking for relationships that can enhance your recovery experience, you may decide to date, get married, have children, or step into some other new role. If it's a hobby you want, you might enroll in an art class or take music lessons.

Finding time to increase your social life or take on new responsibilities can upset the balance you have achieved during the early stages of your recovery. Whatever changes you desire to make in your life or whatever changes occur that you need to incorporate into your schedules, it is important to maintain recovery meetings, time with recovering friends, sponsorship, and other recovering activities.

Charting Your Daily Activities

An easy way to plan to incorporate changes in your schedule is to use a simple pie chart. Drawing a large circle, divide the circle into 24 even slices. These slices represent the hours of any given day. Begin by selecting seven or eight slices for the necessary time required for sleep. This is a big key for everyone's recovery since lack of sleep can trigger those old habits.

Then select the appropriate number of slices to represent your daily work activities, grooming time, and commuting time both to and from your normal activities. Allow slices to represent your recovery activities, such as meetings, sponsorship time, and phone calls made and received to support recovery.

This will leave a few of those slices for time with family, children, parents, etc.

Help is Available

If you or someone close to you is battling addiction, please visit our directory of treatment centers or call 800-772-8219 to speak with a treatment specialist.