How to Manage Your Time Effectively to Scale Up

AVAlexander Volchek

How do you manage your time effectively? Today, we need to find the answer. Not how to manage your time effectively for two weeks before something goes wrong again, but how to manage it more and more effectively every month of our lives, for the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty years. What do we need to do first? Stop counting time and understand that to manage time effectively, you need to step back from the very act of calculating it. When we talk about using time effectively, we enter a state of evaluating what happened in the past. Was something good or bad in the past? Was life better then? Life was better then. Now I'm taking the wrong actions; I need to do them more effectively and manage things more effectively. Or you tell yourself: I'm taking various actions now so that life will be better in the future. Essentially, you're caught between a wonderful or terrible past and an idealized, wonderful future. But speaking of the future, an endless number of people live for it, seeking better moments in the future, better moments in the future, and allocating and evaluating their time now based on some elusive future events.

And when that future arrives, they go back to living for the future. They can't even fully see the cause-and-effect relationships. Because your life has changed, the times have changed, and your surroundings have changed, it's very difficult to find a real balance or understand what's causing your inefficiency. The very search for efficiency is highly likely to leave you with a very poor experience of time, especially living in expectation of something better ahead, expecting something entirely different to happen in the future. What you do need to become clearly aware of about the future is that you're guaranteed to die. Those states of expectation are what you need to avoid. As soon as this kind of thinking arises in our heads, on a sheet of paper, or in conversations with others, it leads to destructive time management. We begin noticing that nothing is happening the way we want. Again, here's a very important point that offers an incredible solution, an incredible next step: don't focus on what happened before, and don't try to predict the future, if you truly want to answer the question of how to manage your time effectively. Effective time management isn't a great calendar or great planning. Truly effective time management isn't even a consistent daily schedule, going to bed at a reasonable hour and getting up early.

Effective time management is something else. It's a state within us, because we all experience time completely differently. It's no coincidence that one person says, “The week flew by so quickly, I didn't even notice,” while another says, “That was such a long week,” about the same period, when the clocks showed exactly the same thing, the same twenty-four hours in a day. You need to broaden your perception and understand that there is no better or worse life. We make an enormous mistake when we label our current state as better or worse, effective or ineffective. You need to acknowledge, understand, and establish very clearly for yourself that things could be far worse than the worst thing that's happened in your life. What seems bad to you may be very good for someone else. It's a question of our particular evaluation, our particular state of perception. How effectively you've lived your life and spent your time isn't measured in performance figures. It's measured in the state in which you lived that time before, are living it now, and will live it afterward. In your state, not in a value or a performance measure. The best thing you can do is spend each day working, without elevating some events above others. Don't say that this action was incredibly wonderful, so you spent your day effectively, while that action had no significance. You'll very likely fall into your own trap of thinking about how effectively or ineffectively you spend your time and how you plan it.