‘The bad news is time flies and the good news is you’re the pilot’
-Michael Altshuler
As Michael Altshuler said, we are the pilot, pilot of our life, pilot to determine whether we utilize our time or whether we waste it.
A pilot must know their route so that they can arrive at any destination they desire, as the pilot of our own life first must know our goals so that we can set our priorities straight and thus work accordingly to reach our goal.
One can not dream of achieving any goals without time management and to manage time we must know our priorities and classify them.
Knowing and classifying our priorities first might sound hectic but we can always do it the fun way. Let’s imagine we have a jar and we will have to fill that jar with stones, pebbles and sand leaving nothing behind. If we start dropping everything randomly we won’t have enough room for all the stones, pebbles and sand. But if we think a little and keep the stones first, pebbles second and the sand last then we will have room for all three of them. Now, the stone here represents our high priorities which may include our values and goals. Similarly, the pebbles represent our basic survival things and the sand represents the useless things wasting our time. The jar represents how quickly our time can be filled up with small and meaningless activities without us even realizing it unless we know what’s important and prioritize the first.
Now let’s take a moment and think about what are our stones, pebbles and sand will fill our jar. After being aware of our priorities we can now manage our time by prioritizing our values and goals which are the stones of the jar.
After knowing our stones, pebbles and sand (i.e. our priorities) we can make a master schedule and use it to structure our daily activities. We can keep track of our schedules via our mobile phones too using google calendar or any other application as per our convenience. One thing everybody needs to learn is to stop procrastinating. We should never leave tasks for tomorrow which we can do today. We need to set specific goals instead of vague and large goals to start managing time effectively this way, we will be able to complete our goals easily and this will motivate us in future. Eating well, sleeping well and enjoying what we are doing is the key to time management. This will help us to concentrate and keep our spirits up.
We all might not be able to manage our time in an instant and it’s okay. Instead of pressuring ourselves to do it right away we can take a day or two off and continue fresh again.