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When Benjamin Franklin said “time is money”, he was only half right. Time is so much more valuable than that. The reason being it that it comes down to supply and demand. If we loose or waste our money we can make that again, if we lose or waste our time, it’s gone forever.
To put this into perspective, there’s a product recently available called the life clock. It’s really more like a computer then a clock. When you turn it on it starts by asking questions about yourself, the day you were born, and health questions concerning you and your family history, when you hit enter the left side of the clock tells you exactly how many days you have lived, the right side of the clock estimates how many days you may have left. You could say it’s a clock with a real wake up call.
It’s important to understand that time is a shrinking commodity. We need to appreciate a sense of urgency that time is constantly ticking away.
Business and sales professionals that quantify results on a monthly basis usually are most productive the last five days of the month because a sense of urgency will always create energy, creativity, and focus, both personally and professionally. In addition to needing a sense of urgency, the biggest challenge in time management is good ideas have nowhere to go.
Our lives are already filled to the brim with activity. The more we try to add good ideas into our life, no matter how important, the more frustrated we get. We need to be aware of what is called the time benefit ratio. We need to ask our selves “Is the time in putting into this equal or greater to the benefits I’m getting out of it.
From there we need to address the five D’s of time management; design, disregard, diminish, delegate, and do it. The first D, Design, make a list of your activities that would have the greatest impact on your productivity and the quality of your life. The second D, Delete start identifying those activities that you can disregard, that is, if you stopped it completely it would not have any significant impact on the quality of your life. The third D is, Delegate if someone else was able to do it for you, the cost of the delegation could offer the ability to reinvest that time elsewhere. The fourth D is Diminish; if you did it less would it give you the luxury of reinvesting that time into more meaningful activities.
For instance the average person watches 5-6 hours of T.V. a day. If they cut back T.V. watching by two hours, just Monday through Friday, they have ten hours per week to reinvest that time into something more meaningful. Now this adds up, in a month’s time that’s 40 hrs, an entire work week. In a years time that’s 12 work weeks, three months of what would be considered the time it takes to work a full time job. So once we start to actually take an activity inventory, the total amount of hours that can be reinvested over a week, multiply that throughout the year it could realistically be more then what is needed to complete the majority of your most important goals and objectives. We actually have an abundance of time, if we use it appropriately.
From the time we are born to the time we die it doesn’t stop. It replenishes itself everyday. It’s our responsibility to use it wisely. A person that says “I don’t have enough time” is like a fish saying “I don’t have enough water” while it’s swimming through it. Stop at the cemetery those people ran out of time.
So D number five is Do it, taking the designs you created from D1 and integrate them into the spaces that were created by D’s 3-4.
Direct our life while we have the time.