Time Machine
“The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.”
– J.M. Barrie
Journaling generally involves the practice of keeping a diary or journal that explores thoughts and feelings surrounding the events of your life. There are several ways to do this. Many great achievers had practiced journaling.
I inherited this habit during my college days from my grandfather after I saw him writing diaries every day. I wrote for a few years, then stopped after I finished college and moved on to work. About 15 years later, I came across an article on journaling and its benefits, and so I started jotting down my daily activities.
Instead of writing with lots of details, I started off by putting key notes in the form of a time log, and started marking the things I valued in each category with different markers. By doing this, I also started noticing there were time slots where I didn’t put any information.
Over the course of some time, it started revealing important things:
- Collective Intelligence – I am precisely able to recollect on what I was doing by referring to the notes I had done previously.
- Black holes – In the initial days, there were many time slots where I wrote nothing and I questioned myself why. I realized I was putting off the work, which I was supposed to do. Instead, I was wasting my time. This important revelation helped me to make it a habit to log my activities more often. I consciously started doing this logging process every 30 minutes. After a few weeks of practice, I started seeing a huge improvement in time gain, and that was the biggest sense of achievement.
- Time Categories – The highlighted areas of my log showed how productive I was on a daily/weekly basis and it gave me the urge to avoid black holes of time.
- Trends & Behavior – I created a measure on daily/weekly/monthly trends on how I spent my time to understand my interests.
This process of logging down important notes in an interval of 30 minutes to 1 hour provided me with collective intelligence over a long period of time, where I can quickly recollect by taking a glance at my previous entries. Additionally, this process of journaling helped with the identification of black holes which in turn, helped me identify the distractors. Furthermore, by highlighting different categories with different colors, I discovered trends about my behavior. This process helped me to rightly invest my time and plan for the future accordingly. This provided all the things a mystical “Time Machine” is said to give.
So, I started calling this practice, Time Machine and created two “Time Machines” for myself
- Office Time Machine
- Personal Time Machine
Time Machine allows you to take control of your time and organizes the time needed for all the things that matter to you. It also helps you to identify the distractors so you can use them moderately or completely avoid them.
Maintaining integrity with your “Time Machine” is a very important criterion.
It is going to reveal your true YOU.
Pick a highlighter color for each time category. The time categories I used were:
- Orange – New Learning, Creative/Productive work
- Pink – Fun time – Family time, Games, hobbies etc.
- No highlight or nothing written – Blackhole – Distractions, time on social media, Casual browsing etc.
When a sculptor creates an elephant, each touch of the chisel shapes the stone. While carving an eye he barely strokes the stone, but those light strokes are as vital as the rough shaping blows. There is no such thing as an unimportant blow.
Every time slot small or big matters; using it to your advantage matters.
Buy from Amazon – Print Copy
Buy from Amazon – Kindle Version
Go to “Headstream – DreamBigBuddy coding club”
Want to continue reading this book online?
Continue reading, Have Fun !
(Please don’t forget to purchase a copy of the book for yourself or as a gift to an aspirant)
Please help me to do my moral loan soon 