Whoever you are or whatever you're up to, the skill you can't afford to joke with in life is Time management. Everybody needs time management as everyone excluding none works with time. Statistics-wise, 98% of every building has a wall clock on it. Even the poor man that can rarely afford three square meals has a means of keeping track with time.
Time, the clock existed with existence. It's not just a discovery or an innovation over time, it is life itself. Time management is an effective skill you must acquire. If time is not well managed, there's no way you will reach your desired destination. Just like the popular statement 'time waits for no one. This is the more reason why you have to be hard on the issue of time management.
Entrepreneurs, and all forms of professions, don't at all joke with time because they have a good understanding of its value. Have you ever wondered how it is that some people seem to have enough time to do everything that they want to, whereas others are always rushing from task to task, and never seem to finish anything? It's all just about Time management. The fact is this, time is the greatest equalizer in life. No matter who you are, your age, influence, race, gender, religion, or even income, you have the same number of hours to spend in a day. Whether you're rich or poor, your time is still the same. It's not about how much time you have but about how effectively you can manage your time.
We can't successfully talk about time management without the discipline it demands. The first thing that is seen of a man that lacks discipline is the lack of time management. If you are serious with this time management, it will give you a high percentage of getting your goals achieved. Time management will help you wave off distractions and leave you disciplined.
Time management is actually not very difficult as a concept, but it is hard to do in practice. It requires the investment of a little time at the start of the day to organize and scale your events based on priority yourself. But once that is done, you will find that your day will fall in place and in an orderly manner with time for everything you need to do and this will subsequently affect your weeks, months, and also years.
I'll share with you the story of a fisherman who made a fortune just because He met one man in his life. It was in the cool of the day when a business expert and administrator met one fisherman.
A Business expert and administrator, on vacation in a small, Greek sea-coast village, was strolling by the bank of the sea also singing along. He saw one fisherman on the quality of his catch and greeted him. He asked him how long it would take him to get all those fishes and the fisherman replied saying it would take him just one or two hours.
The Business expert wondered, twisting His face and asked 'why don't you stay longer to catch more fishes'. The fisherman gave a surprise gesture and explained to the business expert that all He was about is to catch enough fish to meet his needs and those of his family. The businessman then asked him what he does with the rest of the time.
The fisherman answered 'I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, and take a nap with my wife. In the evening, I go to the village to see my friends, dance a little, play the bouzouki, and sing songs. I have a full life.”. The business expert looked at him with disdain and said 'I bagged an MBA from Oxford and I'm certain I can help you make a fortune. You should fish longer every day. Apart from the fishes you use to cater for yourself and your family, you will fish extra and that you can sell. With the money you get from the extra fish, you can buy a bigger boat and this will lead to you buying a second and even third boat and this will generate more revenue.
The executive said, “Well I have an MBA from Harvard and I’m sure I can help you. You should start by fishing longer every day. You’ll catch extra fish that you can sell. With the revenue, you can buy a bigger boat. With the extra money the larger boat will bring you, you can buy a second boat and a third one, and so on, until you have an entire fleet of trawlers. Instead of selling your fish to a middleman, you can then negotiate directly with the processing plants and maybe even open your own plant.
The fisherman then asked 'How many years would this take' and the business expert answered 'fifteen to twenty years thereabout and by the time your business gets big, you can sell stock and make million'. The fisher-man exclaimed in amazement wondering why he was just knowing about that and the business expert continued and said 'after the fifteen-twenty years, you'll then retire, and live wherever you want to live with your family.
He continued ' You can then sleep as much as you can, play with grandchildren, and every other thing you want to do with your life. And that ends the story. So, a man just walked in into the fisherman's life and changed everything just by prioritizing some things above others. You can see clearly from the short story that there's no time management without prioritizing some things.
In prioritizing things, you must differentiate the urgent from the important. Not every important thing is urgent. Urgent matters demand your immediate attention. The truth of the matter is that only you can perfectly differentiate urgent from important. Important tasks on the other hand are tasks that demand your attention but are not necessarily immediate.
A good example of urgent matters is going to a place of work if you're an employee or to class as a student. You can't do anything else when you ought to be in your place of work or in class as it may apply. You may have some other things to do like responding to texts and funny emails but you won't do that at the expense of urgent matters. You must not joke about prioritizing things.
For you to prioritize things, you must be disciplined. Discipline is when you follow those set of rules and regulations laid down. This will involve you waving off distractions. Many people especially young entrepreneurs have not been successful because they can't just wave off distractions. The major source of distractions to young men really is Mobile Phones.
In this age we are in, mobile phone is all some people engage with 24/7. About One-third of the whole world is on the popular social media platform Facebook. You can just be stuck with reading posts, replying to chats, and viewing pictures all day without being conscious of time. You can set a time to do all those. I go on social media only when I'm about to sleep, so I spend little time there.
In the set goals, there's a right and wrong way to get it done. If you don't set your goals the right way, then you won't achieve those targets, which will force you to fall off track. But when you set them the right way, you'll see a fulfilled day in the end. And when you do set those goals, be sure you have a powerful deep own intention to achieve them.
We'll still look at goal setting later but you must know that time management is very vital to ensure one maintains a perfect life. Goals are set a great while before the day starts. As we've examined the difference between urgent and important tasks, you'll put urgent tasks first and get them done and important ones can then follow. You should be flexible also with your goal setting as regards the time intervals. This is because you might tend to spend more time on some tasks greater than the allotted time, this usually applies to urgent and important tasks. For example, there might be days that you'll spend more time than usual in your place of work, or there could even be traffic on your road back from your place of work or wherever you planned according to your set goal.
You surely will have some tasks you didn't accomplish, two things you should do about them. First, you can decide to put a disciplinary measure to it for example if you were supposed to read 30 pages of a book in 24 hours, you can tell yourself that if you fail to, you'll read two times the previous one. This will help you to be responsible for achieving your goals. You should know by now that only a disciplined person can do that.
Second, this is actually if achieving that goal didn't depend on you. For example, this applies mostly to students, if you were supposed to attend a class and the class didn’t hold, to make your day even more productive, it will be very wise of you if you do some other menial tasks that you were supposed to do or even brought down tasks of the previous day.
Let's talk about laziness a bit. Laziness is one of the greatest enemies of time management. Like my mentor would say, laziness is from the mind. People just set limits for themselves (in their minds). Once you agree and settle it in your mind that you'll get something done, I tell you, the sky is your limit. You can't manage time well without shaving off laziness.
The first attribute of a lazy man is the inability to wake up consistently at a set time. While I was an undergraduate, I once have a roommate that sets alarm at all sorts of time but rather fails to wake up. He was always covering himself with that lazy blanket and anytime the alarm sounds, he wakes without opening his eyes, off the alarm, roll on the bed and sleep back.
I've been like that before and I can tell you, such a person cannot make any good thing out of His or Her time. Let me teach you the skill of waking up. It actually starts from that moment that you want o sleep. What was in your mind the moment you wanted to sleep? If you slept after you told yourself how tired you are and how much sleep you need, just be rest assured that you'll never wake up at the right time.
Before you sleep, tell yourself over and over that you have to be awake at the right time and you can even put up with yourself that something is at stake if you don't wake up at the right time. Setting an alarm works also. For example, if you have to be awake by 5 am, you can't set your alarm to 5 am, the best time is at least fifteen minutes before the time you want to wake up, so you could make it 4:45 am.
The hardest job now is to stand up from that bed. Let me help you with that. There's a way I look at my bed and it really helps me. Don't forget, I already told you that laziness is all in the mind. I view my bed as though it is a death trigger. I run away from it apart from sleep time. Whenever your alarm sounds or you mistakenly get conscious, first take a sprint race away from that bed.
You will run away from that bed and stand for a while, you can walk a bit too until your face is clear. Don't stay near the bed to even now get tempted to go back to sleep. Right away do the necessary things you do when you wake up and set your goals for that with high optimism that the day will be fruitful and amazing. Runaway from laziness.