“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is to say ‘I don’t want to’”
My mother has the above, attributed to Lao Tzu, both on the wall of her office and on her fridge, and it rings true to me. I often use phrases like “I can’t talk now” or “I have to leave in a few minutes to get to my meeting”, and every time I do, I think of that quote.
Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of banishing phrases like “I have to go” from my vocabulary. No one, after all, is forcing me to make my meeting on time, or to catch my bus, etc. To say “I have to” or “I can’t” seems like a cop-out. Perhaps from now on I’ll say “I want to go” or “I don’t want to talk now” instead: it is more honest, and, I think, more empowering. Try it out: “I can’t talk because I have to go to a meeting” versus “I don’t want to talk now because I want to go to a meeting”. In the second case, the speaker is in control of his life; in the first, the speaker is a slave to circumstance.
My only worry is that other people might misunderstand. Very often we say “I can’t do X for you now” as a way of softening the let-down: “Gee, I’d love to help you out, but see, there’s something else I have to do.” If you truthfully say “I don’t want to help you now because there is something else I’d rather do,” your interlocutor will probably think you are rude and uncaring.