Three Rules Of Time Management

Bob Proctor the famous speaker once said that I asked this to Earl Nightingale, “How do we manage time?”. Earl Nightingale replied, “ we cannot manage time, but we can manage activities.”

This is not a hidden fact that the life is given only once. Each second and each day, the time is running- in fact it is rightly said, that “Time flies”. Time literally goes by really fast, we cannot stop it, we cannot beat it, and we cannot manage it, we can just plan to handle it by managing our activities. Because the time is passing by so fast, most people have extreme difficulty living a life where they feel the time is out of their control; they just can’t do anything at all.

Many people just keep thinking about what should I do first, what should I do second? And what should I do in the end. As a result, nothing gets done. When nothing gets done, the end result is frustration, anger, lack of self-confidence, and stress. This stress leads to interpersonal relationship issues, issues at work, issues with health and so forth. This situation is not unfamiliar to you at all. The challenge is how can we manage our time? In this blog I will discuss how to manage time (oops manage activities to beat the time), and live a life without stress.

GOAL SETTING:

The time is valuable for those who have a mission in life. Those who have something to live for. Those who have a target, a goal to aim at. People who have a goal, and they know that we all will eventually die, and the time is running fast, only those people strive for the goal achievement and value time. The time management is not for those who have no goals. If you don’t have goals, then reading this article is of no value to you. When there is nothing to achieve then you can just lay down on couch and eat popcorns and watch TV. Thats a style of living many people are living, and there is nothing wrong with that if you are one of those people. But there is one serious problem with such a life style. When you don’t value time, you cannot do anything in life. You can’t even manage your daily life tasks and duties. The stress and frustration will eventually catch you; you simply cannot avoid it.

If you want quality life and want to remain out of stress and live a happy life. Then I suggest you set goals, you should have a mission, a purpose in life. When you have a purpose in life and you want to achieve that purpose, you will realize soon that you cannot achieve this goal if you keep sitting on the couch because the clock is ticking and the time is flying. We all will eventually die, and if we die without achieving our goals, and achieving anything in this life, then why did we come here? Make your life valuable, make it meaningful, make it purposeful. Only then time management will work for you, otherwise you will never value time. To manage time, we need to set goals, and thats the first step in time management.

THE RULE OF BUCKET:

This is the most important rule of time management. Lets say you have a bucket and you have some rocks in a sack and bag filled with pebbles. The bucket size is equal to the size of the bag with rocks and the bag with pebbles. Now if I ask you to fill the bucket with all the pebbles first, and then I ask you to try to fill the rocks in the bucket, will you be able to do it? Absolutely No…. But if I ask you fill the bucket with the rocks first, and then start pouring pebbles, don’t you think the pebbles will find a way and both pebbles and rocks will be easily fit into the bucket?

This is exactly the time management is all about, you need to fill the rocks in your bucket first. What are the rocks? The bigger responsibilities, the bigger tasks, the most important tasks that are a must do task for you. If you do your important tasks firsts, the least important tasks (the pebbles) will find their way. Lets say the least important tasks are not done, they will not affect your life and will not make a difference. But if your rocks (the important tasks) are left pending, your life will be affected and this situation will cause stress in your life. Just do the bigger tasks first.

THE CHECKLIST:

The most common and one of the best ways of managing time is to create a checklist of your most important tasks in the order of importance. The most important task is written on the top, followed by the least important tasks. You can also number them as 1,2, and 3 or A, B, and C. The A task needs to be done no matter what happens, and then the task B. Remember the key here is to not move to the B task until the A task is done. Stick with one task at a time and you will enjoy the fruits of the real time management.

CONCLUSION:

I do agree with Earl Nightingale but I also believe that you can manage time by just managing the activities according to a plan, and checklist, with a life with goals. If you do what I mentioned in this blog, you will notice your life will become a quality life that you will enjoy living. Once your life is on track, convey this message to others.

Dr. Hassaan Tohid


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Hassaan Tohid

PROFESSOR

Dr. Hassaan Tohid MBBS, CCATP, CSOTP is a TEDx Speaker, Entrepreneur, Neuroscientist, Motivational speaker, Trainer, Certified Life Coach, and a Published author.

He has a career with three domains. An entrepreneur, an academic (neuroscientist, and a teacher), and a clinician (Addiction treatment).

As an entrepreneur, he is the founder of California Institute of Behavioral Neurosciences and Psychology. Where he leads the organization as the CEO. He is a trainer, a coach, and a teacher. His training includes Public Speaking, Research Writing and Research Data Analysis, Business training and coaching, life coaching, and Sales.

An academic he is a Neuroscientist and delivered a TED talk on his specialty Mirror Neurons and Dissociative Identity Disorder at TEDx UCDavissf and TEDxUAlberta. He has published over 40 scientific articles and written 3 books.

A clinician with substance use disorder treatment specialty. Dr. Tohid graduated as a medical doctor and chose mental health and substance use disorder as a domain of his clinical career.

Dr. Tohid has delivered lectures on the subjects of success, motivation, business, sales, and research writing and publishing in different languages to thousands of medical and non-medical students.

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