'Time Poverty'
Time is your most precious resource. It is the
most valuable thing you have. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and
it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower
value to activities of higher value. All work requires time. And time is
absolutely essential for the important relationships in your life
P. Thayayuthan
Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is "Time
poverty." Working people have too much to do and too little time for
their personal lives. Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities
and activities and the harder they work, the further behind they feel.
This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill can cause you to fall
into the reactive/responsive mode of living.
Instead of clearly deciding what you want to do, you continually
react to what is happening around you. Pretty soon you lose all sense of
control. You feel that your life is running you, rather than you running
your life.
Take stock of yourself
On a regular basis, you have to stand back and take stock of yourself
and what you're doing. You have to stop the clock and do some serious
thinking about who you are and where you are going.
Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and
activities |
You have to evaluate your activities in the light of what is really
important to you. You must master your time rather than becoming a slave
to the constant flow of events and demands on your time.
And you must organize your life to achieve balance, harmony, and
inner peace. Taking action without thinking is the cause of every
failure. Your ability to think is the most valuable trait that you
possess. If you improve the quality of your thinking, you improve the
quality of your life, sometimes immediately.
Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing
you have.
It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can
only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of
higher value. All work requires time. And time is absolutely essential
for the important relationships in your life. The very act of taking a
moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to
improve your personal time management immediately.
I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a
calculator or a cellular telephone. It was something that you used so
that you could get more done in a shorter period of time and eventually
be paid more money.
Then I learned that time management is not a peripheral activity or
skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.
In your work or business life, there are so many demands on your time
from other people that very little of your time is yours to use as you
choose. However, at home and in your personal life you can exert a
tremendous amount of control over how you use your time. And it is in
this area that I want to focus.
Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your
thinking through what is really important to you in life. And it only
makes sense if you organize it around specific things that you want to
accomplish.
Personal goals
You need to set goals in three major areas of your life. First, you
need family and personal goals. These are the reasons why you get up in
the morning, why you work hard and upgrade your skills, why you worry
about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your time.
What are your personal and family goals, both tangible and
intangible? A tangible family goal could be a bigger house, a better
car, a larger television set, a vacation, or anything else that costs
money.
An intangible goal would be to build a higher quality relationship
with your spouse and children, to spend more time with your family going
for walks or reading books. Achieving these family and personal goals
are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.
The second area of goals are your business and career goals. These
are the "how" goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, "why"
goals.
Level of income
How can you achieve the level of income that will enable you to
fulfil your family goals? How can you develop the skills and abilities
to stay ahead of the curve in your career? Business and career goals are
absolutely essential, especially when balanced with family and personal
goals.
The third type of goals are your personal development goals.
Remember, you can't achieve much more on the outside than what you have
achieved on the inside.
Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish
to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you
must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development. You must
build yourself if you want to build your life.
Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become
anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really
want to achieve. But in order to do it, you must go to work on yourself
and never stop. Once you have a list of your personal and family goals,
your business and career goals, and your self-development goals, you can
then organize the list by priority.
This brings us to the difference between priorities and
posteriorities. In order to get your personal time under control, you
must decide very clearly upon your priorities.
You must decide on the most important things that you could possible
be doing to give yourself the same amount of happiness, satisfaction,
and joy in life. But at the same time, you must establish posteriorities
as well. Just as priorities are things that you do more of and sooner,
posteriorities are things that you do less of and later.
The fact is, your calendar is full. You have no spare time. Your time
is extremely valuable. Therefore, for you to do anything new, you will
have to stop doing something old.
In order to get into something, you will have to get out of something
else. In order to pick something up, you will have to put something
down.
New commitment
Before you make any new commitment of your time, you must firmly
decide what activities you are going to discontinue in your personal
life.
If you want to spend more time with your family, for example, you
must decide what activities you currently engage in that are preventing
you from doing so.
A principle of time management says that hard time pushes out soft
time. This means that hard time, such as working, will push out soft
time, such as the time you spend with your family. If you don't get your
work done at the office because you don't use your time well, you almost
invariably have to rob that time from your family. As a result, because
your family is important to you, you find yourself in a values conflict.
You feel stressed and irritable. You feel a tremendous amount of
pressure. You know in your heart that you should be spending more time
with the important people in your life, but because you didn't get your
work done, you have to fulfil those responsibilities before you can
spend time with your spouse and children.
Think of it this way. Every minute you waste during the waking day is
time that your family will ultimately be deprived of. So concentrate on
working when you are at work so that you can concentrate on your family
when you are at home.
How you can manage time poverty in your personal life
There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually
to keep your personal life in balance.
The first question is, "What is really important to me?" Whenever you
find yourself with too much to do and too little time, stop and ask
yourself, "What is it that is really important for me to do in this
situation?" Then, make sure that what you are doing is the answer to
that question.
The second question is, "What are my highest value activities?" In
your personal life, this means, "What are the things that I do that give
me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction? Of all the things that I
could be doing at any one time, what are the things that I could do to
add the greatest value to my life?"
And the final question for you to ask over and over again is, "What
is the most valuable use of my time right now?" Since you can only do
one thing at a time, you must constantly organize your life so that you
are doing one thing, the most important thing, at every moment.
Personal time management enables you to choose what to do first, what
to do second, and what not to do at all. It enables you to organize
every aspect of your life so that you can get the greatest joy,
happiness and satisfaction out of everything you do. |