Time management
“He who every morning plans the transactions of that day and follows that plan carries a thread that will guide him through the labyrinth of the most busy life.”
― Victor Hugo
Money, human and natural resources need to be controlled and managed by human and machine. Also, time is the kind of paramount resource to even more valuable than money. In the current century the value of time become bold and many books have been written by economists, psychologists, and so on about the time management and how we can spend our time effectively for being creative and mindful; even in the age of distraction. Time is a no-ever-ending resource as our tasks, or our activities are perpetual. Therefore we need to make a balance between these two facts .
The balance demands productive time spent. Generally speaking , we cannot control the time. The only thing we can do is to spend it wisely. Because when it passed it never comes back, that is why people are trying to have good memories in their life. The unstoppable nature of time makes it a most important commodity . Also, Time is beyond being saved. which means no matter you are poor or wealthy, you can not speed up or slow down the time. Naturally, it will pass as it is. This leads us to refer collective wisdom and experiment some techniques to manage the time so that we can easily get things done in an appropriate way.
We have 24 hours like everyone else, and there is no big container . Two primary tasks for managing our time are the simple ones to know. However, they are pragmatically difficult. First, we should have priority in our life. We can always ask questions like Which task would you do if you could only do one task in the day? Second, the art of letting go , obviously like to be a good spouse, a great reader, do the exercise, walking in fresh air, make something, maintain their furniture and so on, but you must choose one of them, and others will have to wait, or not get done at all!
There are a lot of ways to manage the time. Most of them are simple tasks of the daily life; however, they need to adjust to the smarter ones, not necessarily the harder ones. In the following lines I will list some useful ways which I do to make use of my time:
Stop Procrastinating
One of the reasons we always run out of time is to ignore this simple rule. We always procrastinate our task to another occasion; as all tasks need to be accomplished. Most of the time problem is the task itself: it might be boring. But keep in mind if a task seems overwhelming to you it might refer to the size: break it into the smaller ones, and now you might accomplish them all.
Try to wake up one hour earlier each day
I am not expert to comment , but in my case, everyone can adapt him/herself with the sleeping time.
I remember I used to sleep for 5 hours for one year, and I never get tired or take naps in working hours. Based on the personal experience I highly recommend you to find your sleeping time: maybe you need just 4 or 5 hours to rest, and you prefer to do exercise or study for one or two hours every morning. Indeed, being early bird can motivate you to the habit forever, as Benjamin Franklin said: Early to bed early to rise, make a man, healthy, and wealthy and wise.
Stop saying YES
There are two kinds of people: Those who always say YES to everything and the others who fear to say YES. As you know saying YES is a natural process, someone offers you something you like. Hence you immediately react with saying YES. Saying YES is not really saying YES, in doing so you will make a commitment to get that thing done. At the end of the day, you will realize that it takes extra space in your life. I am not saying you should say YES; I mean first of all, before accepting an offer you should consider your priorities first as requests for your time are coming all the day. So you should consider the requests wisely.
A daily routine
There are no benefits of “having a regular plan” benefits only go for the “following a daily plan”. Most of the people make plans for their time, but it is hard to find someone who follows the daily plan. A good daily plan must contain an equitable division of time work to a different activity or task. However, in my case fill the daily program by just one aspect of our life or just one kind of activity is so annoying and it’s hard to follow . Having a daily plan helps us to use our time properly, and every small task that we were done, motivate us to go forward. Beside the fact, doing a big project without a daily plan or Divide and Conquer will not possible.
Focus
In my experience, by focusing on something you can get things done easier than before. The strategy helps you to not doing the tasks in parallel. By parallel I mean you should always do your tasks one at the time. This helps you to focus on the task, not thinking about the whole items of the to-do list. So it is better to do tasks with higher priority. In programming, there’s a term called Yak Shaving. The term generally refers to a series of tasks that need to be performed before a project which can progress to its next milestone. Seth Godin gives this little story to explain the term:
“I want to wax the car today.”
“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”
“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”
“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”
“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”
And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
So please Don’t Shave That Yak!
Track your time
Apparently, Time is the limited source, and people need to monitor their performance by software , or maybe with the “to do list” or a notebook. I am using the most effective tools to increase my productivity: An Add-on in chromium namely focus, which starts a countdown 25 minutes (like Pomodoro). During this time, distracting websites on your list will be blocked. Break your tasks into small to do and cross them off as you go. Before you know it, big tasks will seem small.
