One of my students asks me "I don't seems to have time to do things that I would like to do, why is that?" I just smile at him and ask him do you know the saying "time is money"?
He nodded.
What if I say that we can buy time do you believe that? At the beginning he look puzzled.
What I mean by buying time is that we move some of the urgent and important stuff to other person with a certain priced agreed.
Example of buying time doing the urgent and important stuff:
1. Use a driver instead of driving by yourself, that way you don't have to worry about finding parking place, cleaning up the car, maintenance of the car and all other car related pretty much is his responsibility.
2. What if I can't afford a driver? Well be flexible on your approach. If it takes 1 hour to go to the office by bus, find other alternative motorcycle or a cab. If it is still too expensive to take a cab you can always find other people who work around the same area to chip in.
3. Use a maid to do the laundry and the dishes, or take turns with your flat mate.
And then I raise another question if you can buy time, can you steal time?
Another puzzled look from my student.
I explained to him , stealing time can be
1. While in a traffic jam read books if it is too dizzy, use booked on tape there are many MP3 you can download about NLP, Foreign Language, religion and many other.
2. While waiting always have something handy to read or learn
3. Once in a while you go solo find a good quite restaurant read a chapter or two
4. Find mentor they can shortcut some experience that you are about to do
Have you addressed also some of the time leak you currently have? Like...
1. How many minutes have you use surfing the net blindlessly without any particular aim?
2. How much time do you spend on social networking on daily basis, a staggering number of 45 to 1 hour has been spend in average for people in a day just on social networking.
3. How much time do you use watching TV? a 2 hour spend on TV means you have basically thrown away a good amount of 30-35 minutes on commercial only.
4. How much time you have spend on things that is urgent but not important such as answering chatting from many contacts you have that is not even part of your inner circle person you would like to invest time with?
5. How many junk mail on daily basis are you reading?
6. How much time have we spent on gosipping and talking about other people?
7. How much time has been used to regret about the past? Regretting things that can't be changed? How much time have we decided not to take the stand that the past is not the future?
Have we measured our time consumption?
What can be measured can be improved. So find what things which considered waste of time and start doing some continuous improvement / Kaizen. Hence you will still have the same time and yet you can use accomplish more task.
Have we stop for a minute and reflect on what we do? Sawing a tree without thinking of sharpening it, is like too busy driving and forget to fill the gas. It will get you!
Have we prioritized clearly on things we would do?
So go ahead try some of the tips and I am sure your live will improve significantly.
Inspired by : Stephen Covey (habits 3 : First thing First)
