I took Ankur Warikoo’s Time Management course, so you don’t have to

6 min readJun 12, 2022

This time management framework will teach you how to become more productive & take charge of your time.

Welcome to Not Common Sense, you’re now in the realm of unknown territory reader. Here you & I (mostly, I) try to grapple with the unknown knowledge (for you) & take advantage of it to make life less of a drag (for both of us). But, more importantly, I’ll do more than just provide you with second-hand knowledge. I’ll use my “Not Common Sense” to dissect the knowledge or whatever, to see if it’s knowledge or garbage or both.

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We all know you don’t have time. Most likely you shouldn’t even be reading this, but here we are. And I’m glad for it cause by the end of this article you will be able to spend your time doing valuable life work.

Time matters

You spend your free time like a half-close water tap. Wasting away that precious liquid. You do whatever you want, after all, it’s your time. But the mistake you make is not realizing time is easily lost and impossible to recover.

Ever heard the phrase every second counts. Every second counts when the deadline is near. Every second counts when you’re having fun on your vacation. Every second counts when your loved ones are in hospital and you’re far away trying to reach them.

So you do know the importance of each second when it counts, but only at such critical junctures of life. What about the rest of the days? Why aren’t those seconds equally important?

There are deeper psychological issues at fault here, but will discuss those in my future newsletters.

Therefore, where you spend time matters, don’t mean to sound dramatic, but you’re only getting older and less energetic. So it matters how you plan your day cause that’s how your life plays out. Plan it poorly & you’re left with regrets.

1.) Time allocation

You only have 24 hours in a day, so does the successful people, and so does the rest of the world. The real difference is what you do with those hours cause that will determine what your future would look like.

However remember this, not all hours are created equal. Because during evening hours, you may already be a mess, too tired & damn hungry. Therefore start your morning hours with the most important work that needs to be done. Because it’s either you plan your day or let others plan it for you.

The below framework will help you decide which work you need to deal with at what specific time.

Determine what is important + urgent, then do it. i.e. deadlines.
Determine what is important + not urgent, then schedule it for the future. i.e. Exercise.
Determine what is not important + urgent, then delegate it. i.e. repairs.
Determine what is not important + not urgent, then drop it. i.e. scrolling social media.

Many of you might already be familiar with this layout if you’ve read 7 habits of highly successful people by Stephen Covey (which you’ve obviously not, ha ha). And that’s cool because there’s nothing new under the sun. But in the course, Ankur Warikoo further builds on this framework with by adding the dimension of time.

Now, after adding the dimension of time you ask yourself how much time will this task take?

Any important task you can get done in a couple of minutes, obviously never schedule it. Get your lazy butt to do it right away.

Further, if you conclude a task might take hours, then you first schedule a time slot just to think about how to get it done. For example, you can create a plan to break that task in smallar chucks & spread it across weeks or even months.

The element of time gives you perspective, so you can realistically implement the framework no matter what life throws at you.

2.) Time is energy

Adding the “Time is energy” concept to the existing framework will strengthen your overall time management skills. I say ‘concept’ but it is essentially a truth. Time spent on something is also energy spent.

Energy is spent doing work, but can also be gained if you do meaningful work. Remember when you got all of your work done didn’t it feel good, didn’t you feel energetic, and joyous? Therefore every hour you spend doing important work rejuvinates you.

Now, I’ll assume you all are early birds (You’re not though). So mornings are definitely, more important to you than, let’s say, drowsy afternoons, & after 9 you’re practically walking a zombie.

Therefore, it is important which work should be done when. Starting the morning with the Important + urgent, then important + not urgent, and saving not important + urgent if you couldn’t delegate it, & for the end, do not important + not urgent, i.e. watch YouTube because, after all, you’re only human.

Ankur Warikoo, in his course, showed a ratio of how much time he spent doing each of the four things. It came out as:

Important + not urgent = 52%

Important + urgent = 23%

Not important + urgent = 12%

Not important + not urgent = 13

So basically 75% of the time he was doing important things. And that’s the % you should aim for as well.

3.) Time is money

Now let’s talk about money — the thing you care about the most.

Time is money because most of us get paid for our time. If you’re a salaried person, then it’s very easy to calculate how much every second of your life is worth (Sad).

The “Time is money” concept is to remind you that every hour you spent on non-productive things is costing you money. Taking this into the framework will help you better manage your time.

So, I don’t need to elaborate that scrolling social media, bad, upskilling yourself, good.

Now (Serious talk), your goal in life should be to increase your hourly rate, not because time is money, but because time is value & life. And money can buy you your life back.

However ridiculous that statement seems, it is true, your time is never yours to a point that you have to make major efforts to buy every second of it (not waste it on Netflix).

So instead of doing not important + not urgent things you can learn to upskill yourself or spend time on an important thing that keeps your life meaningful and helps you avoid dreadful depression.

Quick Recap:

Let’s see how to practically integrate this framework into your life.

Decide which task falls where according to the framework.
Use Google calendar to schedule your work, ideas, or activities like exercise.
Decide the most fruitful hours of your day to do important work.
Doing important work will keep you happy, mentally fit, & energetic to do more work.
If you want to take this to the next level, set an alarm to go off every hour from when you wake up to when you go to sleep. Then whenever the alarm goes off. Note down what you did in the past hour.

A personal example

So, I got the idea to write this on Friday, but instead of using the “do it later” mentality & moving on with my regular work. I immediately decided to schedule it. God knows I never schedule but this time I did. Otherwise, I most likely had never written this newsletter like many great ideas I’ve already forgotten.

Further, I schedule to write this in three parts: the shitty first draft, the edit, & the final edit, review, & publish. (That plan didn’t work out. It took a few more days)

By dividing the work across three days according to my most energetic hours I was able to smoothly complete it. (Noting smooth about it.)

The last part, for example, I decided to write late at night because I knew it didn’t need much energy for it.

Now, I hope now you have a practical way to schedule your life and win back your time. Thanks for reading till the end. (If you’re reading this you are a legend.)