How do you spend your timeIJ If one were to ask this question, the answers would offer great insight into the lives and minds of people. Most of us believe that we don’t have enough time to do all the things we want to do on any given day. And yet, we hear that the most successful people find time for both work and pursing their passions outside work.
Arise! Awake! And stop not until the goal is reached. ~ Swami Vivekananda.
An Ericsson consumer lab survey revealed that Indian smartphone users spend over three hours daily on their phones. Similarly, if you watch close to three hours of television every day, you end up spending close to ten years of your life watching the 24x7 idiot box. The average urban citizen spends 70 per cent of the time that they are awake interacting with some form of digital media. Many parts of these activities are a waste of time as more and more people seem to be getting less sleep, are more stressed out and feel tired most of the time due to such activities and engagements.
The first step and priority in the journey of managing your time better is to understand where your time goes. Here are some simple and practical suggestions for mapping your time utilisation. Keep a record of how you spend your time for a period of a week or a fortnight. You could document the time in blocks of 15 minutes each. For those who are technology savvy, various time management apps could be used to identify time usage. Old fashioned paper and pen or the latest mobile on the block – the bottom line is that you have your own personal time data once you have made up your mind on tracking it. When the results and the time usage patterns are out, you will be able to identify broad patterns on how you have ended up using your time. You are also most likely to be shocked to see the large amounts of productive and high quality time squandered away in non-productive tasks or unnecessary activities.
Now that you are armed with the knowledge of how you spend your time, the next aspect to using it effectively involves listing down your professional and personal goals. It is helpful to once again prioritize the urgent and important tasks that are essential and require your undivided attention, and those that could be done at another time or perhaps delegated to someone else. Stating time bound priorities and goals is a small but positive and powerful step in the direction of better usage of time.
Align Your Use of Time with Your Goals
There is more to life than increasing its speed. ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
You may find that you are often stretched too thin. If yes is it that you tend to bite off more than you can chewIJ Do the demands made by others impact your timeIJ Or is it that you do not have any major priorities and feel that you drift from one day to the other. Irrespective of the situation you are in, it is essential that you keep your goals in mind when you segregate tasks on the basis of urgency and priority.
To use your time better you will need to set down time management principles that you wish to adhere to. Practice makes perfect and this adage is true of most things in life. Most of us spend a large portion of our lives just spending time on tasks as they come our way. With a bit of self-realisation and practice you can start using your time better. Once the momentum is there, you can periodically evaluate your time management approach and its outcomes. Ultimately you will have a better work life balance and in every aspect of it.
(The writer is a social & corporate leader and former COO for the Uttarakhand Government 108 emergency services)