Time is considered a separate entity in this universe. It is one thing that can’t be reversed unless you’re Barry Allen, the fastest man alive. Truth be told, I never understood this until my early 20s.
This article will help you to understand the relationship between time & how are we using it. What can be done to make the best use of it? Ways to maintain work-life balance? Techniques that will help you to find the right custom time allocation chart.
Topics to be discussed in this article:
- – Introduction – My Understanding of Time
- – Session – My Perceptive before taking up the course
- – Techniques & Concepts Discussed in Session (brief)
- – How to Implement those techniques to our daily time routine?
- – Work life Balance – What gives us satisfaction at the end of day?
- – Conclusion
My Understanding of Time:
Time is considered a separate entity in this universe. It is one thing that can’t be reversed unless you’re Barry Allen, the fastest man alive. Truth be told, I never understood this until my early 20s. I never believed in timetables, schedules, or specific periods. My friend Roshan, on the other hand, had a daily timetable to do things at a particular time. From there, my journey of inculcating the best practices of time management began. Since then, there’s been no looking back in terms of productivity. Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, but the techniques we use to balance that time make all the difference.
Roshan’s Timetable:
Wake up >> Running>> Breakfast>> School>> lunch >> classes >>snacks>>cricket coaching>>tuition>>watching TV>>dinner>>sleep
My timetable:
Wake up>> stay alive>>sleep
(P.S: I didn’t have a schedule to follow, nor did I worry about it. Poor me!)
I remember my father saying “Time won’t wait for anyone, it’s like a wave. If we understand that, we can surf on it. If not, we will be under the water in a flash. The trick is to understand it as quickly as possible so that we will learn what has to be done in our time”. This is the stepping stone to success. We all have seen people who have accomplished so much in their life, but how could they, when most of us can’t get through the day in a good mindset without feeling guilty for living a day?
My perspective Before Taking Up The course
Recently, I happened to come across a course by Ankur Warikoo with the topic “Take charge of your time”.
I was not fully convinced to start this course. Yet, I signed up because there is more to know about time, especially after I have seen a lot of sci-fi movies about time & black holes, quantum mechanics, and so on. Well, it was worth every paisa!
Techniques & Concepts Discussed in the session
Ankur discussed 3 important concepts to understand time in the best possible way
- Time as Allocation
- Time as Energy
- Time as Money
How To Implement These Techniques In Our Daily Routine?
1) Time allocation:
What is Time Allocation? It is the overall time we spend on our daily tasks.
We can find out the best time allocation model which works for us by segmenting how we spend our 24 hours in a day. Again, this is time-consuming but effective. He got this model from the famous book “7 habits of highly effective people” and then customized it to his benefit.
This simple 2×2 matrix will teach you to allocate your time in an effective way, helping us to spend our energy in the segments which have high priority for that day. We all have problems with prioritizing things in life without feeling guilty when it comes to relationships, work-life balance and honoring commitments that we have made earlier. It’s a given that we have limited time to do things that have to be done. This understanding will help us to say no to things that are less important and do things that are necessary for our growth.
As you can see from the above time allocation matrix –
- Neither important nor urgent – Drop it
- Not urgent but important – Delegate it
- Urgent but not important – Schedule it
- Both urgent & important – Do it Now
I am sure that if we can spend 15 minutes classifying our task based on this matrix and following it accordingly, we will accomplish our 1st goal.
The problem with this matrix is that sometimes the task which you’re going to schedule isn’t much of a big task, so why not do it the right way?
That’s where another dimension comes in, to the matrix called “time taken”.
How to Measure Ourselves:
- Maintain a daily log
- At the end of the day, calculate “how much time spent on each construct”
- Helps understand which segment we spend most of the time.
“Your time allocation should not be a goal but a result of progress.”
We can measure our time allocation in these 8 segments and record it daily. After a while when we look at it, we will know why we are spending this much time on here & what kind of benefits we get by doing so.
We shouldn’t feel guilty about doing this process, after all, we all are humans. Just do this as an activity to know your time personal allocation chart on daily basis.
“Doing this process in a disciplined manner over a period of time will help us to find “Time allocation that works for us“
2) Time as Energy:
Well, what does this mean? Any healthy being will perform well at any given point in time, this is just basic common sense.
4 Types of Energy: (Only we will know the answers to these questions)
- Physical Energy – Energy within your body from physical perspective. Determined by quality of sleep, food intake, fitness level.
- Emotional Energy – This is determined by how confident we are, self-control, and empathy level.
- Mental Energy – Positive self-talking, can you console yourself. Are you excited to do new things in life?
- Spiritual Energy – Do we have integrity, are we honest to ourselves?
These 4 energies make us who we are. How we spend our time depends on our energy level.
Having a time allocation doesn’t matter if you don’t have the energy to do your things as planned.
We can optimize our energy level and get things according to our time allocation chart.
High Energy >>Beginning of the day>> Do important tasks
Low Energy >> End of the day >> Do less important tasks.
Aligning our tasks with our energy levels will help us determine how much we can achieve in a day.
3) Time as Money: (Time is Value)
Think of time as value & spend it accordingly.
How to do it?
Find your hourly rate.
This is important for 2 reasons:
- Opportunity Cost – Cost of giving up on an opportunity for doing another task.
- Actual Cost – Cost from time spent doing a task that can be done with the help of an automatic tool.
Time is valuable, not just money. When we realize this, we start to carefully spend our time.
Recognizing our value is attached to our time, our job is to increase the value as we grow.
Work Life Balance – What Gives Us Satisfaction At The End Of Day?
This is the most important question we all should ask ourselves. Knowing about time has helped me allocate it and use it more effectively.
If you’re running a digital marketing agency which a content strategist, designer, developer, business analyst, or anything else, defining your role & breaking it down into tasks will help you arrive at your time allocation model and thereby achieve your goals in time.
Setting a time for the task we do helps us maintain a work-life balance. It is a little hard to follow the time allocation model that we design but “It helps to see time as an exhausting entity” which is depleting daily. This thought will help us act efficiently and achieve both our personal & professional goals in the given time. Also, we don’t have to feel guilty when we have a little extra fun occasionally. We are humans, not robots to perfectly follow the table. Staying aware of the precious time we spent doing what is important.
Conclusion
Let’s start thinking about the time in months and years & not in minutes and seconds.
Let it be baby steps towards the things we want to achieve, but let’s start walking towards it.
“Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” – By (Steve Jobs)
Let’s improve ourselves in our own time in every way possible. Let’s not give a chance to the external factors that take it away from us!
