Striving and managing your time is on the minds of many people. How we spend our time, how we achieve our goals in a day, how we effectively manage time is what is really needed. It is a famous quote “Time is money”.

Having a clear objective is important in achieving flow, but we also have to know how to leave it behind when we get down to business. Once the journey has begun, we should keep this objective in mind without obsessing over it.

We’ve all felt our sense of time Vanish when we lose ourselves in an activity we enjoy. We start cooking and before we know it, several hours passed. We spent an afternoon with a book and forget about the world going by until we notice the sunset and realize we haven’t eaten dinner. Most of all we use social media the whole day long and yet another day passes without achieving any goals.

The opposite can also happen. We have to complete a task we don’t want to, every minute feels like a lifetime and we can’t stop looking at our watch. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That is relativity.

Here are some basic tips on how to maintain and schedule things:

You need to take baby steps first. Don’t follow someone else’s plan, what worked for them might not work for you.

So here’s what I do:

First, understand and log where most of your time gets wasted.

Then start optimizing and chunking out things that don’t matter.

For example, you realized that you spend 3 hours on Instagram whether it’s just surfing or texting. And you also realized that this not adding any value. So first thing you should try is cutting your Instagram time by say 1 hour.

Recording and self-reflecting are key.

Well, there are a lot of things about managing time which we can talk about. But the point is that it becomes irrelevant beyond a certain context.

There are a lot of books describing well about how to manage time.

But the key principle for effectively doing anything is just analyzing your life through data.

This is the general key to anything you want to optimize in life.

So, I’ll break it down for you as a process:

Step 1.

We create the intent. That means we understand the need for which we want to effectively manage time. The person realizes that he/she is wasting his/her time doing a busy schedule all day and then the need is created to manage time to give more time for the ultimate goals.

Now you have a clear intent of what you want.

– you want to devote more time towards your goal

– you realize that there is not much time available for it

Step 2.

Now you have a motive so you need to do some action. You can just check where I can find the time to perform that action. But you have no idea where is your time wasted, so you start recording your day and check where are most of your hours gone.

Now you have data.

Step 3.

With data, you can start making decisions.

Decisions to cut off things that are of no use. Now that you have decided what to remove from your daily routine, you would know exactly how much more hours you can devote.

Step 4.

Implementing: use the extra hours generated. Compare the progress you did from yesterday’s progress.

Step 5.

If the progress you made is not enough, repeat steps 2, 3, 4, and 5. Make sure you record your time daily and derive some intelligent decisions from it.

This technique will make you super productive in life. To add on to this, there are some general tips which you can follow:

1. Thinking of what to achieve each day: when you wake up, just start thinking and laying out what you have to do today. This will give you better clarity of what is needed to be done today and what is not. This tip will help you make life much easier and make your estimates of time more concrete.
2. Take rewards when you make progress. The science behind taking rewards is that it releases dopamine in mind which will get linked to making progress. In other words, when you give yourself a reward whenever you make progress that will get stored in your mind as a habit. And whenever you would need a reward, your mind will drive you automatically towards making progress.

There are more tips but that would just make it more redundant.

First and the important thing you need to know is the answer to “Can I account for every hour of my day?”

“Can I write it down on a paper?”

Take it slow being in a hurry is inversely proportional to the quality of life. As the old saying goes “Walk slowly and you’ll go far.” When we leave urgency behind, life and time take on new meaning.