Blog: How to improve your time management

Imagine how we can change our lives if we can optimally use this surplus 39 hours that we have!

Most often the people that bear the brunt of our lack of time are our family and our loved ones. Doesn’t it sound irresponsible to admit that we have 39 hours surplus with us in a week and we still cannot spend time with them because we are busy or tired? What kind of message are we giving them when we say that? And more importantly what are we doing to ourselves?

In our calculation, we have gone with a very conservative 40 hr work week. But the top achievers in the world work between 80 and 100 hours a week. Still we never hear stories about them burning out. It JUST does not happen. That is simply because work has ceased to be work for them. It has become the passion of their life. They enjoy working hard on what they are passionate about.

For the rest of us who are still working our way to the top, we really need to utilize our time better. The biggest seepage of time happens through the humongous amount of screen time we all have, which could run to many hours a day. This can be either as television viewing time or as time spent on social media which can be incredibly addictive. We would get to our mobile planning to just check messages and then, our minds running on autopilot move to seeing reels on Instagram and before we know it is one hour or more down the drain. We plan to see one episode of squid games and before we know we are losing sleep on the 8th episode of it.

If we decide to cut down our television and social media by two hours each day and dedicate the same towards our vision and towards the people that we love, we will be creating an entirely different universe for ourselves. For those of us who tell people in our circle of family and friends that we don’t have time, let us think what the message is that we are sending them. We are subconsciously telling them “We don’t want to spend time FOR YOU!”. Its also a known dictum, especially for kids and teenagers, that time = LOVE.

Very often, it is not our words that are heard. It is the non verbal cues and what is left unspoken but thought of in our minds that get sensed by the listeners. So when we do not spend time with them what gets understood could be any, or, all of these:

• We don’t want to change our lives or life style for you
• We are happy in our comfort zone and don’t want to move out of it for anything
• We have different priorities in life which doesn’t include you
• We act as victims and will not change or take charge of our lives
• We are very good at giving reasons on why something IS NOT POSSIBLE 

So if you want to improve your life, you have to start by making a few small commitments to yourselves

1. Commit to spend at least 30 min a day working on you– through positive self talk, affirmations, meditation, deep breathing, prayers etc.
2. Commit to spend at least 30 min a day educating you– through positive books, online training programs etc.
3. Commit to spend at least 30 min working on your vision and reviewing your progress – This is important to do course correction on time before it is too late.
4. Decide who you want to spend your time with – It is important to have meaningful relationships and it needs nurturing for these relationships to flourish – be that with family or friends. So have a broad plan for everyday on which relationship you are going to work on that particular day.
5. Be brave and consciously cut the amount of people who don’t enrich your life and stick with the decision – This leads to heightened clarity in your mind. This will release pressure and stress. 
6. Reduce time spent on television and social media by 50% – It can be done by fixing specific time brackets for screen time maybe by using alarms initially, by keeping the gadgets away from you a few hours before sleep, by fixing yourself a curfew time at nights and early mornings when you would keep away from gadgets.

Time and tide waits for no one. Indeed there is a lot of truth in this old adage. However it is our lack of knowledge on how to utilize our time effectively that causes more of our woes. How we spend our time actually says a lot about ourselves! The excuses that we make for poor time management are also about how well or poorly we handle ourselves and our relationships. The question that we MUST ask ourselves is “Are we masters of our time?” or “do we run after time?”

Time is not a concept to be feared but an animal that needs to be tamed and used to make us feel good about ourselves. The more we run after time, the more time runs out on us. Good time management is about walking ahead with time following you meekly behind and helping you thread the path that you cut out for yourself.

If you are looking for some help with improving the time management skills do write to us at harish@harishrao.world to know how we can help you with it. We would love to work with you on this or any other business coaching needs you may have!