TIME MANAGEMENT HACK

Setting aside several hours and dedicating them to a task used to be a walk in the park for me. It was pretty much all I knew. I would wake up at 5a.m have my bath and do all the things I needed to prepare for my day and by 7a.m I would start to study. I would sit for hours studying with little desire to get up or stop and it was second nature to me. I would still get to the library with the idea of meeting a two hours quota and spend even longer. I had more time to relax afterwards and I would feel so fulfilled but at some point, the drive to stay on course, focus and meet my reading targets started to wane. It was also the same for other tasks, meeting up with deadlines and all other activities I fit into my daily routine.

I started to struggle with time management in almost every area of my life. The most destabilising however, was my reading time. I would draft elaborate schedules containing time slots for studying, recreation, and other extracurricular activities but it all ended up being an exercise in futility till I decided to try something old but at the same time new- plain old ticking items off my list. The worst was ticking the things I had set out to do each day I had written down in my daily planner. The crushing disappointment I felt each time I couldn’t meet up with all the things I had outlined for the day.

I would go online and check tips and nothing really seemed to work. I was struggling with determination and having a debate with myself every morning about why I should wake up or about how interesting my phone screen was or something else.

It became more obvious as time went on that I was focused on everything else but the things that mattered. Where I focused on the things that mattered it would still not be in the right order of priority.

I remember reading this article about a Japanese technique called Kaizen. It involves doing one thing every day at the same time for exactly one minute. Just 60 seconds! The idea behind the technique is that you are less likely to find excuses to do something for a short period of time such as a minute or two. Making that thing a habit by consistently doing that thing, you want to achieve in that one minute will help you to achieve self-improvement.

At some point, I decided to get up and shake myself from my pity party of one about how helpless I was in the face of the enormous amount of tasks I had to cut down on. I started by timing myself for exactly fifteen minutes with an actual timer. It might sound funny or extreme, but honestly it worked. At first, I got distracted by messages and statuses to view and everything else that seemed interesting outside the text I was reading for the first fifteen minutes and before I knew it my timer went off. I was shocked at how quickly the time went by.

I reset the timer for exactly fifteen minutes again and continued reading the textbook with a determination that I would think of nothing outside the content of the text I was studying. Before I knew it, the timer went off again I continued to reset the timer and by the time I was done, I had spent two hours with little progress. I call it little because I discovered that I dwelt on certain aspects of the task for too long but the progress I made was better than the previous days of the week.

I decided to continue my fifteen minutes experiment and surprisingly, it continued to work. I started to feel more confident and less helpless, in fact; happier and lighter than I have felt all year.

The first thing is, to be determined to build a habit or work on a task at a particular time. When you are determined to build that habit you can then time yourself. You also need to focus on the task you want to achieve within the time frame you have decided to work for; whether it is five ten or fifteen minutes. Most importantly, you have to be consistent. Like all experiments you must continue testing until it is proved to be accurate. According to Albert Einstein “if a person studies a subject for just fifteen minutes a day in a year he will be an expert, and in five years he may be a national expert.” There are just ninety six blocks of fifteen minutes in one day, discover how many of the blocs you can use for productive activities, recreation and other activities you would like to fit in to your day

In conclusion, I’m still in the beginning stages of my experiment, but with the success I’ve seen so far, I think you should try it too. It could be five minutes or ten for whatever habit you are trying to build. Also, if you talk a lot or have an addiction to candy crush like I do, you should try it too I’m sure you would be marvelled at how your efficiency rate will improve.

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