#spirituality #selfdevelopment #personaltransformation
How to manage your time effectively? Today we must find that solution. We're not talking about managing time effectively for just two weeks (and then something goes wrong again), but about getting better at it every month of our lives—for the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years...
First of all, what you need to do is stop counting time; understand that to manage time effectively, you need to detach yourself from the concept of measuring it. When we talk about time efficiency, people start evaluating the past: "Was something better or worse before? Back then, life was better; now I’m doing things wrong, and I need to be more efficient and manage it better." Or they tell themselves, "I’m doing different things now so that life will be better in the future."
Essentially, they’re caught between an "amazing" or "bad" past and the idealization of a perfect future. How many countless people live for the future and seek better moments there—the best moments are in the future!—and now they distribute and evaluate time based on some distant, hypothetical events. When this "future" arrives, they again live for the next future: they’re unable to fully see cause-and-effect relationships. Because your life, time, and environment have changed, it’s very difficult to find the true balance and understand what’s causing your inefficiency.
The very search for efficiency is likely to lead you to a bad state of time perception—especially the life of waiting for something better ahead, thinking that everything will change. What you need to start doing in the future is realizing that, in the future, you are guaranteed to die.
These thoughts should be avoided. As soon as these kinds of reflections pop up in your mind, on a piece of paper, or in conversations with others, it leads to destructive time management. We start to notice that things aren’t going the way we want. A very important turning point that leads to an incredible next step is to stop focusing on what happened before and stop trying to predict the future if you really want to solve the question of how to manage your time effectively.
Effective time management is not a great calendar and not just planning. It’s not even a strict daily schedule—going to bed early and waking up early. Effective time management is something else. It’s a state within us because we all perceive time in completely different ways. It’s no coincidence that one person says, "The week flew by so fast, I didn’t even notice," while another says, "That was such a long week!"—in the same week, with the same 24 hours a day.
You need to expand your perception and realize that there’s no such thing as a better or worse life. A person makes a huge mistake when they label the current situation as better or worse, efficient or inefficient. You must understand that things could be much worse than the worst things that have happened in your life, and what’s bad for you might be great for someone else. It’s a matter of our particular judgment, our perception.
The result of a life’s effectiveness and the time lived isn’t measured in metrics but in the state in which you lived through that time before, are living through it now, and will live through it afterward. In the state—not in the meaning, not in the metrics.
And the best thing you can do is live each day with effort, without elevating some events above others. Don’t say, "This action is incredibly cool, so I lived my day efficiently," while "this action has no meaning." Because you’re very likely to fall into the trap of your own thoughts about whether your time was used effectively or ineffectively and about planning it.