Skip to main content

TIME..The commodity that cannot be exchanged for money..


Time is the only resource we are born with, all other tangibles, like a house, automobile and money, we build during our lifetime. Whether we make it in life or we stand broke depends on how effectively we utilize time. It has been researched for more than 5000 years to understand how to control time, and the experts have miserably failed in achieving it.

Time is not a commodity that can be controlled but can only be utilized. Factually speaking, the world’s richest man and a common man, both have the same time 24 hours every day, but it makes a difference when he utilizes time by earning around 50 million work hours every day through his employees. This concept is called as time compounding, the more the work hours you have in your name, the more you can achieve in shorter periods of time.

It really, really does matter what we do with every minute of ours. Suppose we waste 20 minutes a day, it adds up to 7300 minutes a year or an equivalent to 5 days. Did we ever imagine we would be having only a 360 day year if we waste 20 minutes of a day? So how about folks who waste hours and hours in front of television? Just think of the days they are losing out on!! Let me give you a better illustration; suppose we read one book a week, which is 52 books a year or around 500 books in 10 years – will we not be the best in our field? We will undoubtedly be the king in our area of working if we have the knowledge of more than 500 books. I am not speaking of books like comics or novels; I am talking of books in technical, sales, administration, accounts, marketing etc; those pertaining to your field of interest. And if you don’t happen to be sure of what it is that interests you, here’s a tip that Brian Tracy speaks of in one of his books. “Visit any book shop; you will be naturally attracted to the shelf having the books in your area of functioning.”

If we need to learn to manage time effectively; the easiest method is to model someone who has done it as neatly as it can be done. Specifically anyone who has become rich from the rags, any first generation multimillionaire should be a time management guru. If not for their time management skills, they would have remained employees like us and retired at the age of 58. It takes a lot of expertise on our side to manage time effectively. It’s just not enough to do something right; we should do the right thing at the right time.

 Say, we may be an expert basket ball player, but we can’t be playing basket ball during office hours. There is always a right time for everything – there is time in your life to enjoy, to love, to work like a dog, to fight for survival, to celebrate success etc. It is to take forward all these activities of our life in perfect harmony that we require time management.
Here are some tips that I follow to utilize time effectively:
1. Prioritize: Always prioritize your task as priority A, priority B etc. Always do priority A task first. Never even attempt to do a priority D task when priority C task is pending.
2. Have a plan: Be it for an hour, a day or a week, have a plan. Planning reduces duplicate work.
3. Summarize: Have a summarization of the day’s activity when you retire to bed. This helps you analyze whether you did a right thing at the wrong time.
4. Do things faster and smarter: Develop the habit of doing things faster and smarter. You’re wasting so much of your time when you do things lethargically.
It may seem funny, and you may ask; “Wont our lives be purely mechanical, if we had a time table for each day?” The answer is even funnier “What if we could retire financially independent 10 years earlier?”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Change.. The ability to redirect your energy…

I hope that by the communications we have had so far, you would have started outlining your goals and defined a time frame to achieve them. If you haven’t, then start right away! Remember, " If you start early you become successful early". We all should be developing the 'DO IT NOW !!!' attitude, I can assure you the results are incredible! Change, is a measure of our ability to take different paths leading to the same goal. Change is an inevitable part of success. I believe, when we start up something new, we are guided by a magical "beginners luck" but beware as it doesn’t last forever! At a later phase we won’t get the results we wanted. We may also feel like we have emptied out all our resources. This is where ‘CHANGE’ comes into play. "The only thing that doesn’t change in this universe is the word change itself". Most people quit at this point. They don’t put in the efforts to do the R&D. If we strongly have a goal in our mind, when all ...

Just Shut Up and Listen... (JSUpL)

If you are confident, get up and speak, if you don’t know the answer Just Shut Up and Listen (JSUpL). These words are not unfamiliar, but are truly unpracticed. Its almost natural for us to react to situations around but most often we forget to whether we are the right person to advice people. Whatever is your age, experience, qualification – you need to develop the habit of listening to topics that you are not aware of. You need to respect the person who is helping you learn new practices and principles. Most often our ego gets in the way and protects us to learn things from people who are not qualified, inexperienced, under aged but with knowledge. This is so true, and just like it applies to me, it applies to you as well. Let think of this situation, you are 8+ years experienced in your organization, now a fresher comes in and talks about things that are knowledgeable and intellectually correct – but your ego gets in the way, and your years of experience logically defends the freshe...

Momentum Revisited...More of speed than skill…

I could understand from the feedback received on the previous newsletter that some of you had difficulty in assimilating the new definition of momentum that I had put forth. So I have decided to revisit the topic and explain a bit further. In the previous newsletter I’d defined business momentum as the product of skill and speed. Most often we see in business, that leaders tend to increase their speed infinitely so as to compensate for their lack of skill, to keep pace with the market. This phenomenon can be clearly seen in the billion dollar retail industry. Almost all major players focus primarily on improving their customer network prior to improving the quality of products. This is because of the immense latent power in networking. It would be foolish for a retail distributor to limit his operations to a single centre and concentrate on improving his products rather than on improving the quality of operation. This phenomenon can be seen all around us, but we may not have given it s...