Bookshelves are crowded with books that offer to help the readers in their time management. The claims aren’t false but the methods are vague. Motivating one to manage time and keep an eye on the watch each moment, isn’t the real thing that one should be doing to manage time.
Children in schools are conditioned to the following slogans and they fall prey to the belief forever:
- Time is Money!
- We should take good care of this wealth!
- Gone Days cannot come back!
- Time is precious!
We all have heard these lessons and have seriously followed them as well. But when we see the people who are really successful in their lives and occupations, we do not see the role of 'time' actually. Why am I denying any credit to their time management? Because it was not time actually that they managed with utmost perfections; it was their Focus that they tamed. Time is as dynamic as life is, if we cannot win over life, it is not possible to cage time either.
Isn’t it wonderful to see the rationality behind this saying?
Don’t Manage your Time, Manage your FOCUS. Yeah, true it is! We have been knocking at the wrong door all our existence. Rather than managing the resource, we should have been managing the ways of using it. Once we know the destination, the purpose and the goal for which the time is to be utilized, it becomes logical to think of success or a rethink.
If you have 60 minutes and you need to reach a place which is 100 miles away and you are sans anything to drive. Walking 100 miles in 60 minutes will certainly be a failure. The one who has a managed focus shall first see the task i.e. reaching a place which is 100 miles away and see the amount of time as well. Rationality suggests that it is better to look for vehicles and tools that can help do the 100 in given 60 minutes. Positive thinkers will say that it must be tried but the Focused mind will look for assistance and the probability shall remain relative in all situations.
If I know that I am in a domain where such tasks will be thrown at any moment, the ‘Managed Focus’ shall keep the ‘Resources Arranged’. When we see the goalkeeper in football during a penalty shootout, where is the preference going? What is the significant question? It is the Focus of the player! Once focused, then comes the time management. Time is a currency that we shall be utilising or making the best use of. For this, we need to be assured about what we are going to spend the precious resource on.
Time isn’t a currency to be saved rather it is a type of screwdriver which shall be used where it should be used. I frankly suggest that before you get trained as a mature Time Manager and Critical Thinker, preserve your ‘preference sense’. If your focus is on Maths or English, give time to them. We have seen millions of people wasting their time because they did not have a purpose alias Focus.
What we do is more important than the amount of time we have.
When our concentration and efforts are focused on something, we naturally manage time.
I have seen my friends getting stressed during exams because they fail to ‘MANAGE THE TIME’.
I suggest that the need is not to control the clock, but they should manage their focus which will result in better learning and better results.
Drive the time-wagon to your destination. The driver's ‘focus’ shall take care of the hurdles and hurricanes as well. When you know that you have 30 minutes to write a blog, rather than panicking, you focus on the strength area and pick a topic which is near your mind. It is easy to compile your observations then. We can add numerous analogies to prove this point. A doctor has two patients and 10 minutes left before his office hours conclude. Where as one of the two is in a fatal condition and the other was admitted the previous day and has mild fever. Where would you want the doctor to go? The one in the Traumatic condition or the one in a stable one?
If your answer is the former one, you have not bothered about the time clause. Be it 10 or 100, your focus won, not the management of time. You change your Focus and your decision about the selection changes per se.
Time does not remain a thing to FEAR when it gets strength from our Focus. I wish to advise the young readers of this post and most particularly the teacher and parents. We need to accept that we cannot race against time. It is not controllable because it is not an object that we develop. But, Focus is something we develop and what we make, we can manage.
So, Don’t manage your time, Manage your Focus!
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels
