By Adetayo Okusanya 4 hours 45 minutes ago
Article from The Nation Online
Wow! It’s February already. Where did January go? It seems like it was yesterday that I wished family and friends a happy new year. Thirty one days gone in the twinkling of an eye; the equivalent of seven hundred and forty four (744) hours, or forty four thousand six hundred and forty (44,640) minutes, or two million six hundred and seventy eight thousand and four hundred (2,678,400) seconds. We have already exhausted approximately eight percent of the year. It simply begs the question, how did you spend all this time and what will your return on time invested be?
This month, I want to explore the subject of time management and it will not be a flying visit. I intend for you to marinate in the subject matter until you walk away with a keen sense of urgency that the clock is indeed ticking, and you don’t have all the time in the world to satisfy all the competing demands for your attention. February is a great month to talk about time management because time management is a crucial driver of how effective you will be in accomplishing the goals you have set for the year. Unlike “airtime” you do not have the luxury of being able to infinitely “top up” your hours. You, and the rest of the people that share this planet with you, have the same twenty four hour days to accomplish your personal and career goals.
What is time and why is it so important for you to manage how you spend it? I have combined two dictionary definitions to describe TIME as the continuous passage of existence in which events pass from a state of potentiality in the future, through the present, to a state of finality in the past, and which is measured in units such as seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, or years. Time is what lies between the day we are born and the day we die. Therefore it is finite and limited in quantity. Harvey Mackay said, “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it you can never get it back”. Alan Lakein also said, “Time equals Life. Therefore, waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life”.
So, how can you be the master of your time this year? It’s simple. You must have the discipline to control what you do with your time. It is a resource that you must optimally allocate, the same way you optimally allocate your financial resources. Since you would probably not squander away your financial resources, why would you allow everything to take up your time, whether they are ultimately important or not to your long term goals? Put differently, would you invest your money in buying shares in a company with a stock price that will never appreciate or pay dividend? Or would you invest in a venture that is certain to yield zero or negative return on investment? But that is what some of us do most of the time. We literally fritter away our precious time on tasks and activities that have no long term value.
Time management is the process by which you apply principles, techniques, strategies, tools and behaviors to help you be more productive and effective in accomplishing the things that are important and urgent every day. If time is money, then the goal of time management is to improve your quality of life by getting you the “biggest bang for your buck”. Don’t confuse time management for getting every single thing done. No, effective time management is about you getting the right things done at the right time, delegating unimportant tasks and dropping tasks that are of no importance or urgency. It is about being smarter about the use of your time and not trying to squeeze every conceivable activity into your day.
I recognize that this is easier said than done, in a world that pulls you in different directions and overwhelms you with a million things to do for yourself, your family, your work, your friends, your government, your country, etc. Over the course of the next three weeks, I will share with you the steps you can take to be successful at managing your time schedule, the skills and tools that will enhance your effectiveness at managing your time, the return on investment you will enjoy, the downsides of poor time management that you will avoid, as well as time wasting activities or habits that you must lose.
Sir Francis Bacon said, “Knowledge is power”. Join me next week to learn more about how you can be the master of your time.