Don't waste something that's limited and rare. Oh yeah don't waste your money you mean, absolutely not, I mean time. It was a long weekend recently and yes I did go out with my friends, I did meet my teacher who came from India, but honestly, when I was home, I was simply doing nothing and wasting my time. It was at that moment, I realised that the time that's gone, is not coming back. I feel like shit after wasting time, especially because I did spend almost 2-3 hours in reels and at the end of it all I was exhausted myself. I mean what was I doing? Watching those stupid reels for 2 hours. Basically, I wasted 2 hours of my life and I was like what is really happening, I should have found some better way to utilise this time rather. But anyways it's okay, now that I think about, because it was the past and I can't anyways change it but I can always learn something from it and move forward in life right. So today, I am going to talk about Samay ka sadupyog. Basically good utilisation of time. Remember, we don't want to fight for more time, accommodate more in less time or anything like that. But the correct way to put it is we want to use our time effectively rather. So I am going to talk a little about what is time? Why do we need to manage it well and how to effectively manage it.
So what is time? "Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future.[1][2][3]" This is the wikipedia definition, a continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present and into the future. Basically, it's a continuous sequence that's it. You can have events in it, or existence itself is time. Now that we know what is time, I like defining time is simply existence. Anything that occurs between birth and death is time. Whether you experienced a trauma, whether you experienced happiness or sadness everything was a part of time. So the definition does not give us much.
A lot of times we think about time management as a being busy. But the question is what are we busy about? Are we busy playing video games or are we busy coding something? Are we busy eating healthy or are we busy eating junk? Are we busy watching reels or are we busy watching something meaningful? So time management is not just about being busy, but it's more about busy doing the right things.
Often we lack that we don't have time. But the real problem is we might not have the right direction at times, the right way to solve a problem or something. Life in itself is problem solving, we have problems, we understand the problems and then we work towards solving it. But sometimes we take the wrong direction and when we go in the wrong direction we suffer with over analysing and trying to solve the problem at once. Remember we need a ladder towards success, not a lift. So direction is much more important than just time, time utilised in the right direction is important.
When we think about money, we can always earn more with our skills. When we talk about owning a home, we can always lose a home and earn it back. In fact any material things can always be earned back, hypothetically. But time once lost is never coming back. We need to be well aware of that time once lost is never earned back, irrespective of anything. So remember time is a very valuable asset. But that does not mean we should rush into anything, we should still find the right time, the right effort in the right direction. If something takes 3 hours, don't be a hero and try doing it in 2 hours, managing time is not rushing, but utilising it. You need to control your time and what you do with it.
Now that we know what time management is, let's see why should we manage time effectively?
1. Control: When you manage time effectively, you feel more in control. You feel like your life's steering wheel is with you, not with anyone else. Thus making you feel more in control of what you do with it.
2. Stress reduction: Stress reduction is just a result of taking control. We all know those days when we have so much to do and very little time. We know those days where things don't go according to the plan and you need to work a bit harder to get everything on track. It's those days when time management really helps. You would ultimately feel in control and feel like you are doing something about it.
3. Improved decision making: When you manage time well, you naturally have more mental clarity. With more mental clarity you get more, you get to analyse your options effectively. You get to know what's right and what's wrong when you consider all the options. So manage your time effectively and you will feel more clarity in life.
4. Enhanced focus and creativity: When we manage our time well, we are more likely to do the things on time and not worry about the other things that come in our life. For example, while working you would not think about your girlfriend because meeting your girlfriend will already be scheduled and you would enjoy then and work now. And similarly while meeting your girlfriend you wouldn't worry too much about work because you were completely focused while you were at work. So this will give your mind mental space to think about the things.
5. Present: Believe it or not, when you focus on one thing at a time, you will be naturally more present and mindful of where you are and what you are doing. This will increase your self awareness, and even your mental strength. Being present will help you enjoy life a little more, will give you more happiness and more productivity as well.
6. Earn Money: Earning money is not a result of thinking about earning money, but if you manage your time well, you will be more effective at work thus earning more money. So don't worry too much about earning more money, worry about managing time and money will eventually come.
7. Increased Confidence: When you manage time well, complete stuff on time, you feel more confident in your abilities. This will give you more confidence and more confidence in you means that your team will feel more confidence in you as well. So time management does give you confidence as well.
8. Opportunities: When you manage your time well, you're more likely to seize the opportunities you see because you will find the time to complete those opportunities as well. So now more opportunities will eventually mean more money right? Haha it's a cyclic dependency.
Now that we know why time management is crucial in our lives, let's seek out some practical ways to manage our time.
1. Use some time management technique that works for you: A lot of times people get overwhelmed by the time management techniques that people have created. It's not about you know worrying and constantly shifting your time management techniques, it's more about finding out what works the best for you. So this blog is to simplify your job and give you a list of techniques, but the idea is not to use all of them, but find one and stick to that one that works for you.
A. Eisenhower Matrix: This one is quite famous and personally, I use this one most of the times in my life. I create 4 quadrants, as shown below:
As you can see, if something is urgent and important then just do it. If something is important but not urgent, it's okay, you can schedule some time for it and do it later. If something is urgent but not important, we just give it to someone and something is not urgent and not important as well, just remove that thing. So the first thing I do is track all of the thing I did in a day and then put it in the right quadrant. My general goal is to do the important and urgent things more often than anything. Ideally, I like seeing the urgent column really empty because if I have scheduled a time for important things, there would really not be anything urgent if I do everything ahead of time. You can do more research on this, but for me this works well.
B. To dos: Why not create all your todos of the day and make a simple list. This is a very simple technique but yet very effective.
C. Time blocking: I have seen a lot of people do the time blocking technique, personally it does not work for me, but the reason is that when I block lets say 2 hours for a task and if I take more, the whole system just gets disrupted, but I have seen people having real success with time blocking. In fact I did it in school days, but does not work for me anymore.
D. Eat that frog: Brian tracy, the of the famous author of the book, eat that frog suggests that when you do work, pick up the toughest task first and then move to the easier ones. This will allow you to make sure that the toughest job is done in the morning itself. Thus giving yourself much more time to do other things.
E. ABC Method: This method is simply about prioritising. Take all your tasks, and divide them into 3 categories, A, B and C. A will mean the highest priority item and C will mean the lowest priority item. Thus you would have a sequence in which you need to do all these tasks.
F. Pareto Principle: They say 80% of the results come from 20% of the items. So identify those 20% and work towards them first so that you get 80% of the results. This might or might not be true in certain cases, but true in most of them. I generally don't recommend using this, because I don't believe this is true in all cases.
G. Parkinson's law: This is Parkinson's law and he states that work expands to fill the time that's available to complete the work. So if you feel like something can be done in 2 days, try setting the deadline in one day and you would actually complete most of it.
There might be many more techniques but the idea is to just do what works for you and use this technique. After all knowledge without application is just information. Overall, time management is a key skill that contributes to success, well-being, and a fulfilling life.
Remember like any other skill one needs to practice this to get better at it. I would just say at the end of it all, in my opinion its all about being in present and try and doing one thing at a time. So just go for whatever technique suits you. Have a great day !
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