After you understand the time techniques and underlying principle, it will be easier to acquire great time management skills.
Value Time & Desire Time
Time is precious. Not only your time. Everyone’s time should be as valuable to themselves regardless of how much money they earn per hour.
But since you are here reading, I am sure you want more out of your 1440 mins a day. And if you believe in reciprocity, what goes around comes around, multiplied. When you start respecting other people’s time, they will start to respect yours too and even more.
When signing off email, I couldn’t see the representation of “Regards” or “Yours Sincerely”, other than trying to project myself as a good English student. Thus, I changed mine to “Thank you for your time”.
Also when communicating, emphasize on your time assertively. Subtly you will notice changes of their behavior towards you (At least in the aspect of time, for those who really care and respect you)
Being Aware – How Your Time flows?
When you are in your most productive state, you may lose track of time. But that is perfectly fine, because you know it is a time well spent.
“Eliminating existing problems are usually much faster than coming up with better solutions.”
What you need to take note of are the unproductive periods – Hours of nothing meaningful that are just gone before you realized. Those are the time wasters or so called time drainers. You have to think of ways to cut down on these, so that you know you can move towards a better life sooner and faster.
I wouldn’t really suggest you to track your time to the minutes, a general sense or feel of time will do. Tracking of your time will take more time and effort too, unless you don’t even have this general sense, you may want to track your time by the hour.
Common activities of time waste
- Surfing the web, especially social sites like facebook where news of your friends and all your [Likes] topics are lined up on your wall waiting for you to read.
- Watching TV
- Playing video games – I am a game addict too, esp RPG and MMO. I always remind myself this:
- “My gaming achievement has no meaning in reality…”
- “Do I really want to be an uber gamer when I am a nobody in real life?”
- “Do I really want to have the “LV” gears in games when I only have T-shirts in real life?”
Sidetrack: For gamers and other addictions
The questions I ask myself usually come with a “No” because I am a believer in Push factors being a bigger motivator than Pull factors. I am still a game addict, especially old games – Psychological effect of childhood dreams. Just that now, I leverage on gaming as a reward after accomplishing tasks for the day. And when the time comes when I am no longer a nobody with a freedom lifestyle… *grinning*
“All these can wait… But the movement towards a better life must continue every day no matter how small a step today maybe.”
Clarity & Focus
Clarity is power, the clearer and the more specific you are in defining your goals, the faster you will achieve them. Because you made it easier to focus on them.
- Being clear on your life purpose
- What are the things to do?
- Which task has the priority?
Gain Clarity by getting your idea on paper or on screen is very important
On paper, you can’t reorganize what you have written so certain new ideas are out of place or space, but there is something magical about the art of writing than typing. Studies have shown that your mind connects better with your ideas when writing them.
But when doing a brain dump or projection, you will want to get your ideas out of your mind fast. So you might want to consider using an audio recorder – It is the fastest way I know, your mobile phone is your number 1 productivity helper. Then from audio to text.
On the audio-to-text part, I was using Dragon Naturally Speaking speech-to-text software and a Blue Yeti microphone back then. Just be sure to get a USB microphone for better performance. Else what you said may not be correctly transcribed, but that may be just my poor pronunciation and the software’s need to learn to recognize what you are saying over time.
Update: Now there are a lot more speech-to-text software available with even higher accuracy that somehow we feel a dedicated text-to-speech or speech-to-text software is no longer a good option in the market, especially in the fast development Ai software technology market.
On-screen, you might want to consider having some mind-mapping software to organize your ideas. Mindmanager was my favorite back then but free software like Freemind is good enough for what I am doing now. Check out the video below on mind-mapping as a learning tool.
“When you feel better you’ll do better”
Related Time Productivity Posts
- After some time management techniques insight, time to move on to Time Management Skills
- Or in case you have missed our generic topic on About Time Management