Time is continuous and it does not stop, time will not wait for you and it will not delay. Let’s take the 24 hour clock for example, we are all gifted with this every day, we all have the same 24 hours, the same 1440 minutes, and the same 86,400 seconds. So let’s make it count.
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If you are not sure what to do, then let’s break it down to a typical working day:
- Sleep (33%) – Unless you are a super human and require less sleep and can still function healthily and sustain this for a long time, then let’s say sleep takes up about 8 hours of your day, every day, this can’t change and cannot be combined with anything else.
- Wash (2%) – Let’s say you spend just 15 minutes each day and night to wash yourself, that’s 30 minutes of your day. We can also agree that this is important to retain your health.
- Travel (4%) – If you need to travel to work, this may take about 30 minutes to and from your place of work. Call this 1 hour in total.
- Work (29%) – Let’s say you work 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. Straight away, hopefully you can see how much time this uses. We will need to talk about this in more detail.
- Eating (8%) – We all need to eat right? Technically we should attribute 4% or 1 hour towards each working weekday, then you can see that work takes up a third of our time, which is equal to our sleep time. Then another 4% or 1 hour for our evening meal.
- Reading (2%) – We all should be bettering ourselves by reading, listening, or practicing a new skill, let’s give this 30 minutes.
- Exercise (2%) – We should all be doing enough exercise each day to keep our body fit and healthy, let’s also give this 30 minutes.
- For You (2%) – Giving yourself time is important, give yourself just 15 minutes each morning and each night to just plan the day ahead, think about the day, reconcile the day, being grateful, meditating, getting yourself into a positive state and visualising your goals.
So where are we at? Sleep (33%), Wash (2%), Travel (4%), Work (29%), Eating (8%), Reading (2%), Exercising (2%) and me time (2%), that already brings us to 82%. We have 18% left, which is about 4 hours and 20 minutes. What are you going to do with that time? Note that we have not even talked about family, friends, relationship, and the weekend, which you typically do not work. But what if you slept that extra hour? What if you got stuck in traffic for 30 minutes? What if you worked that extra hour? That will take you to 92% quite easily, which means you now only have about 2 hours left.
This is what breaking it down looks like, now let’s see how we can optimise this.
- Sleep – usually something we cannot take time away from and usually people will need around 7 – 9 hours of sleep per day to rejuventiate themselves. Unless you are lucky and have a special sleep condition and only require say 4 hours a day, then what we should focus on is getting a good nights sleep, so make sure you have a good clean sheet, a comfy pillow and good posture for your back.
- Travel – unless you live very close to your work and don’t have a long commute, then this part may be something you cannot avoid. However, if you do commute, then you should probably focus on that, but when that becomes a bit routine, then you could combine this activity with another activity, say listening to a podcast or audio book.
- Eating – you got to eat right? But how are you eating? Do you enjoy cooking up a healthy meal? Going out to a restaurant? Ordering a takeaway? Meal prep? Who are you eating with? Are you exchanging a good conversation over a meal? You can still make this time count.
- Working – now this is a big chunk of your time, it would be worthwhile for you to break this down further. How effective is your time at work and are you heading towards where you want to go? Plan your day, your week, your month, even set goals and forecast where you want to be in a years time and break this down to smaller manageable chunks. Set realistic goals and create a plan to help you achieve this. Then take action. Action is key, move in that direction, whether it is learning a new skill in order to execute the plan or just executing the plan, you do need to do it.
Don’t neglect the small things. Washing and exercising is important in maintaining good health, in fact it is critical if you want to sustain longevity. Even if it is a quick 30 minutes each day, you should cover this part the majority of the time. Similar to sleeping and eating healthily to replenish the body with energy, without this, everything else is irrelevant.
Now that we have the basics covered, you can see that we have about 2-4 hours each weekday and a full weekend (about 10-12 hours each day) free to spend time with your relationships. Do this and be present, don’t take work to your relationships, that time is reserved for working hours. However, if you intend to sacrifice these limited hours to build a company or spend time on your big project, then be aware that you will be sacrificing this time in order to build this dream that you have envisioned.
Hopefully this highlights where your time goes and how you may want to tailor it to you. Hopefully you can also see that if you want to achieve greater heights, then you must work on yourself to provide greater value for others and more effectively. Tomorrow will reset itself and you will hopefully be blessed with another day, so don’t waste your time on holding onto negative thoughts and hold yourself back, undo these thoughts, learn from it, turn it into positive learnings and do it better next time.
Finally, come to terms with death. This may be the hardest lesson of all, but also the greatest. If you can come to terms with this inevitable situation, then hopefully you will not let negative energy stay inside you, you will let situations unfold as they will, let it pass, deal with it, learn from it and move on fearlessly. This does not mean you should throw your brain and logic out the window, but more so that you should not waste time holding negative energy inside you and let temporary unknown trivial situations hold you back from taking action to take you where you want to go.
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