How to Manage Your Time Effectively
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.“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.” ~ Ben Franklin.
Most of us feel like we do not have enough time in the day to do all the things we would like to do. Mostly we feel like we do not have enough time to do the things that are truly important to us, the things that would help us achieve our goals. We have all heard of time management and while we agree with the concept and think it is a wonderful idea to “manage our timeâ€, most of us rarely get around to doing anything about it.
The truth is that when we consider time management we do not understand how we can apply it to ourselves and we do not understand that we need to make a paradigm shift in how we view time. Time must be viewed in terms of how it is used in relation to your goals. Time must be viewed in terms of its value for you, in terms of effectiveness in achieving your goals.
Time as nourishment
It is useful to think of time in the same way that we think of food. Food can be nourishing and healthy for you or it can be malnourishing – creating a state of unhealthiness within your body. Any time that is spent in working towards your goals can be thought of as nourishing. Meanwhile time that is spent in activities that are counterproductive to your goals is malnourishing. This is clear and obvious, however what is not so obvious is that time that is just idled away or wasted at ‘useless, ineffective activities’ is also malnourishing.
What is Nourishing Time?
What kinds of activities make your time usage nourishing? It depends completely on your goals and objectives. Any activity that brings you closer to your goal creates nourishing use of time. For example, if your goal is to study hard and get an A, then any time spent on studying is nourishing time.
But does this imply that all your time blocks must be allocated towards achieving some active goal on your goals list? Not necessarily, but it does mean that you must make conscious choices about how you use your time. For instance, a common unwritten passive goal of every human being is to maintain a state of mental health as opposed to mental unrest or mental dis-ease. In order to achieve this goal, how might you need to spend some of your time? Relaxing, de-stressing and unwinding. So therefore, meditating, watching a movie or simply sitting quietly will all be nourishing constructive use of your time.
What is Malnourishing Time?
What might be considered malnourishing time? Well, if your goal is to be upright and honest and you find yourself spending time with some less than honest folks who might negatively influence you, then this is obviously malnourishing. However there are many instances where it is not so obvious that the time is being used in a malnoursihing way.
For instance, if you go home and plunk yourself in front of the tv and spend 4 hours watching tv before going to bed. Is that malnourishing time? Or is it nourishing time? Well does 4 hrs of tv contribute to some goal of yours? Does it relax you or does it just numb your mind? Are you just idling away the time – without a conscious decision to do so? Did you see the tv on and sit in front of it and next thing you know its bed time? Then that might well be malnourishing time. It is just time spent. Not towards any goal. So therefore it is time wasted and therefore malnourishing. It all depends on your intentions. If you had had a particularly tough week , working very hard and you decided that you were going to just relax and watch tv all night long then it might be nourishing. It might be giving you an opportunity to rejuvenate and recharge. We will discuss if it is the most nourishing use of your time to achieve this goal later on.
How do you use your time?
The idea here is to get a rough idea of how you use your time. Each block of time, whether it is a moment, a second, a hour, a day or a week, is either nourishing or malnourishing. And the very first step in time management is to become aware of how you use your time – how much of your time is nourishing and how much is malnourishing?
So for each instant of time ,you should be able to say if it is nourishing time or malnourishing time. So at any moment, you could ask yourself “Is this the best use of my time?â€
Tomorrow we will talk about how to replace malnourishing time with nourishing time and how to maximize your nourishing time.
“Forever is composed of nows” ~ Emily Dickinson.
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