To Become What You Want To Be
The headline of this message may leave you wondering: Save two whole hours?… that too from an already hectic schedule? That’s impossible!—many of you may shrug off incredulously. But believe us, it is possible. Your intrinsic commitment to your goal will make it possible. And these two ‘created’ or saved hours can be life-changing. These can give you cutting edge over your peers and make all the difference to make you what you want to be—an IAS, engineer, MBA, doctor and what not.
With these two extra hours, you get 14 extra productive hours or more than a day in a week, and nearly two additional months in a year, which you can fruitfully invest in your efforts towards the ultimate career goals. Isn’t it fantabulous?
It is true that most of the serious lot among you feel time-starved and caught up in an endless to-do list. The key here is to take stock of your daily schedule. You might have overstuffed your lives with many a trivial unproductive daily ritual, which, if cut out, will create more time for you.
Author Ms. Marie Forleo in her latest book titled ‘Everything Is Figureoutable’ rightly says that it’s never about having the time, it’s about making the time. “Everything you do, you choose.” So, try cutting down on the idle time you spend on your mobile phones, the time you waste on browsing the internet for the stuff you don’t need, or the time you lose watching the idiot box.
Forleo rightly says that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. Thus, for the next seven days, write down every single thing you do, from the moment you wake up to the moment you to go to sleep. Just grab a notebook and track your time in two—10- or 30-minute increments. Then minutely analyse your time spent. As you do so, you will realise how much time you fritter away on dumb stuff that has no connection to your treasured dreams.
The idea is to free up about two hours a day for your productive pursuits. For that, pay particular attention to society’s biggest time sucks like social media, email, the internet in general (shopping, gaming), traffic & commuting, unnecessary get-togethers, television, running errands, or being on your mobile phones. Particularly, the mobile phones deserve extra attention as research shows that we are likely to underestimate our phone usage by nearly 50%. You must have experienced that how a casual glance at your WhatsApp sucks you into the labyrinths of friend-groups, messages and videos, etc., meaninglessly killing two, four or sometimes even six hours of productive time altogether before you realise it. This precious time, wasted mindlessly, could have been easily saved. To begin with, go screen-blank, eliminate all social media, TV, podcasts and online videos from your schedule. Believe us, you will survive.
We are talking of saving two hours a day as it is enough of a stretch that forces you to challenge deeply-held assumptions about how you have constructed your life. The cumulative effect of spending two more hours a day towards a meaningful goal will alter the trajectory of your life. However, if you manage to even save just one instead of two hours, it will still be a great far-reaching achievement. Your plan to make best use of the time so created or saved can act as a stepping stone to success.
Here, it is pertinent to draw upon our experience as well as exposure to the success stories of our readers over the past six decades to sum up the mantra of ultimate success, that is: “Invest Best Time and Best Effort.” As they say, Time is Money. Metaphorically, the same is true for you too. At the present stage of your pursuit of a career, time is the only real capital that you have. How you invest it, will build or break the life of your dreams.
Time is ticking fast and it is high time for you to seize the moment productively. It is the today that creates the future. Let’s take inspiration from a saying that “The bad news is that time flies. The good news is that you are the pilot.” Remember, time is life—waste your time and waste your life, or master your time and master your life.
Nothing changes if you do not change. So, break your patterns and step away from societal norms that suffocate your lives. With a few tweaks, you’ll see how possible the more productive time really is. Remember, time and tide wait for none. Recall Mother Teresa when she says: “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” Make a new beginning as the creator of your career. And your time starts now…