Awareness is crucial for successful time management. Everybody has heard the expression that time is money. One of my favorite writers, essayist Michael Ventura, once wrote that time is life, meaning that how we use our time defines our life. And if we are unconscious about how we spend our time, then our life is going to be pretty unconscious.
Have you ever taken a long road trip of about 500 miles and you figure that based on the highway speed limits and stopping to go to the bathroom and stopping to get a bite to eat, that you should be able to make the trip in about eight or nine hours? You don’t stop at every visitor’s center you come to. And you don’t stop and explore every city you drive past.
You have a goal and you are not going to be distracted in reaching it. If you have committed to yourself and others that you are going to make the trip in nine hours or less, then you make sure it happens.
But when it comes to long-range goals, some of us tend to be not so concerned with time. If we are trying to write a book in the next year, we don’t think much about the implications of taking three hours out of our week to watch a football game, or 30 minutes a day to drink coffee and read the newspaper.
But over a year, these blocks of time spent frivolously add up. When we go through our day, for successful time management, we need to be as focused on how we are spending our time in non-productive ways as we are in the productive ways.
For instance, my job is to sit at my desk in my home and write an article everyday for this blog, plus related work on website maintenance. I now keep a sheet of paper on my desk on which I jot down, once an hour, how I spent my last hour in non-productive action. I call it an Off Track Activity Time Log.
When I started this practice I thought I would find some startling information. I thought it might show that I played with the cat for one minute, talked on the phone for five minutes, walked into the kitchen to get a snack for two minutes, gaze out the window for one minute, check my email for one minute and go to CNN.com for five minutes. That would add up to 15 minutes-a fourth of an hour.
Over an eight-hour workday, that would be two hours spent going in the wrong direction, yet it would seem to me (if I didn’t give it a lot of conscious thought) that I was putting in eight hours of work. That would be enough to keep me from reaching my goal, which would have negative consequences.
Successful Time Management and the Law of Observation
But as the research shows in quantum physics, what we observe is changed by the observation itself. For instance, an electron when observed will appear as a particle, but when not observed, will manifest as a wave. That’s how a single electron is able to travel through two separate slits at the same time.
Likewise, just the fact that I will make a note about my wasteful actions in the last hour will cause me not to make wasteful actions. My productivity has sky rocketed since I started this activity of observing my time.
The simple act of having this sheet of paper on my desk brings consciousness into my workday, which eliminates the unconscious activities. Often people do so many things without thinking that they lose control of their life.
In my case, the sheet of paper tells me I haven’t wasted anytime. But guess what–it’s the sheet of paper that is responsible for it, or at least a big part of it. This practice has become a vehicle of my consciousness over time.
If we take an action, either it is a step towards our goal, or a step away from our goal. We have the choice to go straight towards it, or divert ourselves. When we have only so much time to make a goal, such as a deadline that cannot be avoided, then our actions can mean the difference of achieving the goal or not reaching it at all.
For example, if a doctor has a patient who is bleeding profusely, the doctor has only a certain amount of time to stop the bleeding, or the patient will die. That’s obvious and I don’t think a doctor in that situation ever says he needs to take a break and get a cup of coffee or check the latest stock prices.
But sometimes it is not so obvious. If you’re writing a book, you might not see the urgency in writing a certain number of pages a day. You might get up from the desk and watch some television, check your email, return some phone calls, pay some bills, eat snacks, play a computer game, play with the cat, take a walk, watch the news, read the paper, check TD Ameritrade, and then discover that you are tired, and take a nap.
These types of things are habitual and for the most part unconscious. Before you know it the whole day has passed and you wrote only a paragraph. “Oh well, tomorrow will be a better day.”
But guess what? Unless you focus your energy and eliminate the distractions, tomorrow and every day are going to be more of the same. If you have a few more days like I just described, you will never get around to writing the book. You’ll give up, thinking you’re a failure. But it was only a failure in what I calla conscious use of time.
If you were on your road trip, would you pull over to read the newspaper or find a bar or lounge so you could watch some television? You might pull over to take a nap if you just couldn’t stay awake, but more likely, you would drink a cup of coffee, or if you have someone else in the car with you who can drive, you would change drivers.
When we focus our energy, that is, when we put all of our energy into one task, we have more than the capacity to reach our goals–we have conviction. That gives us energy and enthusiasm. Fear and doubt are vanquished from our mind. Momentum has manifested into our life due to being conscious about our use of time.
Have you ever had to push a car by yourself? Do you remember how difficult it was to get the car rolling, but once you had it moving, it was easy? That’s how momentum is when we are moving towards our goals.
If we stop, it is hard to get going again. Someone who exercises everyday has no problem doing so everyday. But if he quits for a week, it will be hard to get the motivation to go back to exercising. It’s the same with anything–dieting, reading, writing, saving money, etc.
If you can harmonize your body, mind, heart, and spirit to work together towards the same goal you will have more focused energy and make more conscious use of your time. You will not be pulled in multiple directions. You will know in every cell in your body that your goal matters.
When you have that awareness, that your goal matters, and that your life matters, you will also be more conscious of time, because as we have already discovered–time is life. Respect it. And when your life is working, you’ll find that easier to do. Successful time management makes that possible.
One Comment
Thanks for this post!