How To do More Everyday

Time

Time is a precious non-renewable resource that is given to everyone is a portion of 24 hours every day. This is one of the few resources, if not the only one, that everyone living on this earth has in the same quantity. Talk about fairness. Time is a resource in that it can be exchanged for money, true to the old adage, time is money. A good number of people are employed in places where they spend roughly 40 hours a week in exchange for a salary or some form of emolument, time in exchange for money. However, the exchange of time for money is not a linear relationship. You don’t get paid just by marking time. You get paid for how much you do in the given time, and the results you produce. We live in a world of results. What speak for you are results, and not necessarily how much time you have expended. I reiterate, results.

Social Media Mania

We are currently living at a time when there is so much happening around us, both physically and virtually. Social media, driven by advancements in technology have successfully “shrunk” the world. Information exchange is in real time. A study, conducted by researchers at the University of California-San Diego, under Roger Bon, believed on an average day, people are inundated with the equivalent amount of 34 Gb (gigabytes) of information, a sufficient quantity to overload a laptop within a week. This study was conducted in 2008 so you can sure this number is much higher in 2022.  According to a survey conducted this year, 2022, it was found that on average, Americans spend 2 hours, 54 minutes on their phones each day, that is nearly a month and a half (44 days) on their phones in 2022.  These studies may have been conducted in the US but the results can fairly be generalized.

Everyday Distractions

We are constantly distracted by the vices in our environment. Multiple studies confirm this. Distractions don’t just eat up time during the distraction, they derail your mental progress for up to a half hour afterward (that’s assuming another distraction doesn’t show up in that half hour). In other words, that “30 seconds to check Twitter” isn’t just 30 seconds down the drain. It’s 25 minutes and 30 seconds. How to you salvage yourself from this chaos, you may wonder.

Time and Management

Human beings by nature are not very intuitive about how to organize tasks in a given time frame. It is not uncommon for students to wait for the deadline to write and submit an assignment. In light of this, it is very imperative that you devise a methodology for managing tasks. The old adage which says that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail holds true even in the case of managing tasks around time. If you have noticed, I have deliberately avoided using the term “Time management” for personal reasons. I don’t believe time can be managed. (I don’t think you can manage what you cannot speed up or slow down or better yet stop?) While I don’t believe time can be managed, I know I can manage my tasks around time. So how do I manage tasks around time.

To-Do-List

My approach is very simple. I plan my day the night before. Over the years, I have found that if I attempt to plan my activities in the morning of the material day, it is always an exercise in futility. Planning the previous night just before bed has worked wonders for me. I simply write out a To-Do-List of all the things in need to do the next day, big and small. Then I take a minute and see which tasks are of more importance than others, which ones are more urgent than others, which ones require more of my time and which ones require less of my time. I then organize the list and categorize the tasks in classes of importance, urgency and required time. This forms a plan of action for the next day.

Conclusion

I have found that this little list works like a charm. It acts like a magnet and pulls me towards doing each task on the list. I personally derive joy just from ticking out the tasks off my list, so much so that upon doing my last task, I often get the feeling that I sold my self-short by having so few tasks on my to do list. By the end of the week, when reviewing my To-do-lists, I get the feeling of satisfaction knowing that my time was well spent. Word of caution. Take inventory of all vices that act as distractions in your environment. For most people, their mobile devices are the number one vice. In the next article, I will dive deep in how to manage your distractions without getting detached from the reality and losing out on the benefits that social media provides.