To reiterate what I’m all about as far as what I’ve dedicated my life to – I do indeed believe I have found the secret to happiness and at the very least the secret to success, although I don’t quite have all the ingredients required to implement the recipe. I should probably be a business coach or something…Haha, just kidding – I think developing this blog is a more than adequate channel through which to share the valuable life lessons I keep learning.

One such life lesson is that of how to effectively manage one’s time, so I do indeed have some great time management tips to share which have been working out very well for me so far.

Taking stock – the introspection

Before we even get to all the regular stuff which exists as information which is in the public domain, like how you should map out a time schedule and populate it according to a timetable which focuses on the important tasks first, first we have to take things back to the beginning.

If you’re a functioning adult in an age where you’re earning your living through the completion of some kind of work, the likelihood is that at some point in your life you suddenly didn’t have as much time in a day as you did when you were much younger. You probably wish you could have the nice life problem of watching the clock as you once did as a child, in anticipation of something which was to come and take the place of the “nothingness” you were made to be busy with while passing the time.

While it may be hard to point to the exact moment which made for the pivot into a life which has you not having enough time anymore, the need for taking stock through an introspection is vital.

After all, there are still 24 hours in a day and if anything you no longer have to help pass time by taking that nap your mother forced you to take as a little kid, so you should have more time on your hands instead of less of it, shouldn’t you?

Take stock and keep a time-journal for just one week, but if you can stretch it to a period of at least a month then that will be all the better. Just keep a journal of how you spend your time, keeping it simple through something like just writing down 6-7:30am (driving to work), 8am-4pm (work), etc, for example.

Working on efficiency

The best case scenario which would arise out of the initial exercise of taking stock of how you spend your time would be that of glaringly pointing out to you some ways through which you could make use of your time more efficiently, such as how you might endeavor to go to bed earlier each night so that you can wake up earlier and eliminate the idle time you waste stuck in the slow-moving traffic on the way to work. That would have a serious knock-on effect because you’ll be saving money on the likes of your fuel as well, all while “generating” more time where there didn’t seem to be any.

You can then move on to working more efficiently into the way you spend your time, such as may be fitting in a gym session before settling down at your work desk as you’ll have a bit more time, together with steps like doing your grocery shopping on the way back from work as opposed to on a Saturday morning. In the small spans of free time, you could indulge yourself in brain-boosting games like Scrabble, Online crossword, Sudoku, and more to keep your mind sharp. With certain online games, you could maximize your numeric creativity based on what you play. You may not be able to find the right NY Times Crossword Answers
to an online crossword game instantly. That way, you might spend lesser time on a game you can easily get addicted to.

Building consistency with such habits may help you build consistency and efficiency. Like if you calculate all your staff leaves in an online database it can boost your efficiency and also it can reduce your business cost. If you are a business that operates from home or from a distance, you may want to look into virtual office software where you can use registered office address services so you can maintain anonymity whilst conducting the business that you need but still have open communication with those who need it.

Aim for a tangible yield of the allocation of your time

Ideally what you’d want to do is what I’m ultimately trying to do, which is to come away from the use of my time with something that is tangible. For example, if you need to gain more Instagram followers, don’t spend all week chasing individual follows. Hand it over to a growth service that can organically increase your following quickly. I guess we can coin a motto: “Do it once and then benefit from it over and over again…”

The best way through which to do this is not necessarily the most practical, which would be monetising whatever it is you have created as a result of the spending of your time, otherwise, every bit of time spent doing something ultimately gives you some experience which would be valued by someone else.

That’s why I blog about what are seemingly “regular” things – the content created is something tangible that can be used to extract lasting value out of. So the worst you can do is write a book about it or something like that.