Time
People are much more busier than ever before.
With the boom of the internet, everything is very accessible and available at our fingertips instantly. Every media is fighting for our time, and they all want to keep us for as long as they can.
It has been calculated that 80% of our active time is spent on social media, the internet, and TV, while only 20% of our active time is spent on productive work. Checking social media is a serious drain in our current century, which steals our resources without us realizing. It also makes us be in the reactive mode all the time – we are influenced to do things based on the posts/feeds we come across, instead of our plan to do what we wanted.
Distractions are the procrastination monkey of your mind, which makes you delay things even though you know it is a waste. These distractions are stopped by a forceful reality called a deadline. Until we get closer to a deadline, this monkey makes us waste our time. Using the pattern, “Desire to Destination: D2D Marathon”, we can help fix this problem, which I will be explaining in detail under Section 2: Patterns and Practices.
For instance, let’s assume life is fair and everybody is going to live for 100 years. Take a sheet of paper and put 10 small boxes in each row, and repeat 10 times. In the end, you should have 100 total boxes. Each box represents 1 year of age. Shade the number of boxes as per your age. Maybe you are past 1/5 or 1/4 or 1/3 or half of the total allocated life. If you think about it, it all flew like a day or week – so fast isn’t it? Can you visualize how soon the remaining is going to go? But realistically, we also know life is not fair, and that it varies for every person.
It takes a minimum of 3-5 years, maybe even 10 years, for a business or any big project to be stabilized, and to reap its benefits.
On average, everybody goes through a learning stage of 16 to 25 years to even take a shot at doing something.
Assuming you are starting any project in your early twenties, you can have a maximum of 5 chances, even if you fail to achieve 4 times. If you are smart, lucky and provide the right ingredients for your project, you may reach your success early on, but that is not guaranteed. So don’t wait to get started.
One fair thing in the world is, everybody has the same amount of time in the day (24 hours/ 1440 minutes) in spite of who they are. With all the things happening around us, each day that we wake up is a gift of its own, which we need to embrace.
Value of Time:
Time = Exponent of your current self into future
Time = Traded Opportunity Cost
How and where you spend your given time is the critical decision you need to constantly make to ensure that the odds of success are in your favor.
The rich can invest money, but the poor can only invest Time.
“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.”
-Harvey MacKey
This whole book is written utilizing the spare time available in the evenings and during the weekends. I feel very achieved on this usage of time.
When I started using the tool “Time Machine” (which I will be explaining in detail under Section 2: Patterns and Practices), I began to see the drains of time, and realized how I can channel that time effectively to my advantage to achieve my goals, for which I previously never found time to do, because I wrongly thought I was super busy.
Multitasking is not a skill or power, but instead, drains you. Rather, prioritize and uni-task to utilize time to the fullest and not waste time on regaining your train of thought.
Multiplying TIME is a SKILL – you can achieve that by automating, delegating or simply answering the question: do you really need to do a particular thing or not?
Saying “YES” to a thing will automatically imply saying “NO” to many other things, which will have to be delayed or cannot be done.
Time can be created only for what you really want, but what you want is a choice.
The choice may be personal or forced.
“If you don’t make the time to work on creating the life you want, you’re eventually going to be forced to spend a LOT of time dealing with a life you don’t want.” – Kevin Ngo