Chapter 11 - How to Use the Greatest leveler? (Time Management, Day 9) | Begin with “I” by Rohit Sethi - Self Help Learning PDF Download

How to Use the Greatest leveler? (Time Management, Day 9)

“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?” ~Henry David Thoreau

This happens to be one of those days when Ron got up happier than he did on other days. He does his morning rituals with the bathroom mirror and shower. He has breakfast and joins the car pool where he starts to share the findings from his reading openly. A friend who started reading too, talks about his experience.

The day in office is normal. Ron is more positive than usual. He finds himself being nicer to everyone and more productive at work in general. Ron gets home, follows his routine, and is ready for the discussion. This is day nine. He realizes that it is just for one more day that Ron+ will be with him. He realizes how far he has come in his quest for self-realization and is keen on making the most of these last two days.

“Ron, today we will talk about time, the greatest leveler. I call it so because no matter who you are, rich, poor, young, old, you always have the same number of hours in your days.”

Principle 1: Time management is life management, our use of time either works for us or against, the choice is ours

“The strange thing about time is that if we don’t make it work for us, it will naturally work against us. There is a saying ‘You don’t kill time; it is time that kills you!’ Change is a part of life, everything changes. Not all change is for good by default. Progress or positive change needs to be designed. If you lose your money, it is possible to get it back. But, time once lost cannot be regained. If you spend time well today, you can be sure of making money in the future. If you let things be, time can fritter away unless you intervene and make it a point to spend it in a way that you get the most out of life.”

“If you lose your money, it is possible to get it back. But, time once lost, cannot be regained.”

“You will see many people around wasting time as they do not have a vision or clearly defined goals that they want to achieve. If you think you have already wasted a lot of time in the past, and thus there is no point managing it better now, think again! It’s like saying, since you didn’t have a 10-year vision when you were 30, and now that you are 40, there is no point having a 10-year vision now. Think of yourself at 50! Irrespective of what happened in the past, won’t you be better positioned at 50 if you have a vision for the next ten years when you are 40, versus not having it at all? That’s the good thing about personal development. Irrespective of what happened in the past, you can always begin afresh. As per the Chinese saying, ‘The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time is now!’”

“That’s the good thing about personal development. Irrespective of what happened in the past, you can always begin afresh.”

“Without vision or goals, one cannot understand the spirit of time management. People mistake time management to be an ‘add-on’ skill that they can have in addition to the core skills they use to earn a living. They think that the objective of learning to manage time better is to be able to squeeze in more things within their days when they really don’t feel any need to do it. It is not really that. When one is able to master time, one is able to enhance and enrich the quality of their life. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your time. When you spend your time on activities that you do not want to do, the quality of your life cannot be too high.”

“When you spend your time on activities that you do not want to do, the quality of your life cannot be too high.”

“Don’t get me wrong and think that I am telling you to become a superefficient machine that lives life clocked to the minute. I am not. We are humans. We want to laze around sometimes and do nothing or procrastinate at times or just enjoy good things that life has to offer. That’s perfectly fine! Remember, even successful people procrastinate, but it is just that they choose different activities to procrastinate on. You will usually find them procrastinating on low-impact activities.”

Principle 2: Simplicity plays a key role in managing time better

“Practicing simplicity is a golden rule for time management. Do not get me wrong here. By simplicity, I do not suggest that you should live a simple life and not enjoy the finer things. What I mean is that you should reduce the complexity, as in remove things that prevent you from being mindful and present in the moment. It means to not have your mind flustered with hundreds of things at the same time. You can choose to have fewer experiences in life, so your mind is not cluttered. But, go for the finest experiences that you can manage from a time, money and logistics perspective.”

“Remove things that prevent you from being mindful and present in the moment.”

“I will tell you about a few considerations that you can have to bring about more simplicity into your life:

• Have less stuff – Most people are in the habit of buying more things than they need. Once you have more things, they will take more of your time. A key approach is to take on a spring clean at home or office once every six months or a year as it may be feasible, to look at everything you have and decide if you use or need it anymore. If you find that you do not need it anymore, do away with it
• Do lesser things – Decide on clear focus areas in your life. Say that you choose three focus areas at this point in your life: job, family and health. It is difficult for people to focus on more than three areas at any point in time. Try restricting them to two or three. Ensure that most of your time is spent making progress on these areas. Within each of these, ensure that you do limited number of activities and do not clutter them a lot. You can then get the maximum impact and fulfilment from all that you are doing
• Streamline your tasks – Get into a habit of grouping related tasks so you can finish them together. For instance, if you plan a trip to the mall, take a few minutes to make a list of all that you need to get done and spend a few more minutes visualizing how you can move inside the mall to do these things, thereby prioritizing them”

“Do you recommend multitasking?”

“Yes, I do but not in the way the term is used normally. I have a subtle distinction to make. A bit of judicious multitasking can save time. But I do not recommend overdoing it as it can start to suck the joy out of doing those things in the first place. As with everything in life, one needs to find their balance, that is, the extent to which they can multitask without losing the point of doing that activity altogether. Try out different degrees of multitasking and stick to the one that works best for you.”

Principle 3: Master the art of creating time windows; within each window, be focused and efficient

“Get into the habit of creating time windows. To do that, the first decision you need to take is what would be the smallest unit of time that you would like your life to be organized by. For instance, let it be two hours, one hour, thirty minutes, fifteen minutes or five minutes. We don’t want to become machines doing everything efficiently by the minute. We want to experience mindfulness as well. When we do something, we want to experience the joy in that activity rather than just rushing it up to move onto the next. Under this overall guiding principle, choosing one hour as the standard unit works well. This can be a personal choice. Some might like to make it one and a half hours or two hours. There is no right or wrong here.”

“Choosing one hour as the standard unit for time management typically works well.”

“In my view, going under one hour can make you rush everything you do. It can kill the inherent joy in doing anything. I know people who manage their time by fifteen and thirty minutes and they are always stressed. Another reason to not go below one hour is the finding that for anything meaningful to be produced, it typically takes sixty to ninety minutes of focused effort. On the other hand, going up to two hours might lead to a lot of slack time within your activities.”

“I understand. Can you give me an illustration?”

“As an illustration, when you plan your day, you can plan it by one hour as your standard unit. Wherever you anticipate more, say forty to forty-five minutes, round it up and take one hour. Though we chunk the day by one hour, I am not saying that you should waste the free time you get in the day. Say you planned for one hour to travel but reached in thirty-five minutes. Now, always have activities that you can build into these bonus time breaks, say reading books on smartphone or tablet. Even if you can manage ten minutes of reading a day and if you learn to speed read, you can finish an average book in five hours. This will imply that you can read one book a month just in your bonus time breaks! That will mean twelve books per year for which you did not even dedicate any time within your schedule!”

“Yes, that will be great! It is like creating additional time!”

“The ability to focus on one task at a time and complete it as is or better than expected remains the biggest determinant of success. If you do not mix work and play, you can enjoy both more as you will be able to experience focus in each activity without being disrupted. When you do one activity at a time, there will be an anticipation or excitement to get to the other activity that continues to provide something to look forward to in your life.”

“The ability to focus on one task at a time and complete it as is or better than expected remains the biggest determinant of success.”

“People these days are more and more distracted. They are not able to put focused effort into a single activity. To me, this is alarming! People spend so much time with their smart devices and make the technology go against them instead of using it in their favor. Smart devices have made it easier for us to see and share how others achieve excellence in their areas of expertise. It hardly adds any excellence to us. On the contrary, it takes away our valuable time that we could have used to create mastery in our own lives.”

“Hmm, I appreciate what you are saying. Any views on what can be a good way forward?”

“I am sure that result-oriented people even today are constantly thinking of ways to use technological innovations to help achieve their goals rather than getting distracted and losing focus.”

Principle 4: Speed reading can save thousands of hours over a lifetime

“Ron, these days we are bombarded with so much information that it is increasingly difficult to selectively absorb only what we want. In addition, if you are a slow reader, you end up spending a lot of time reading things you should not have been reading in the first place.”

“Learning to speed read is a skill that can save you thousands of hours over your lifetime. It enables you to:

1. Quickly scan through something to decide if you want to read it or not
2. Read it quickly for information that you want to get from it”

“Reading is one thing that you cannot escape and you need to do it all the time in both, your personal and professional lives. If you can become faster at it and extract pleasure from it rather than consider it as a pain, you can increase your level of well-being with this one skill by being more resourceful. The first thing that needs to happen to be resourceful is to have a high level of awareness on how things are and how they work.”

“Speed reading can enhance your reading speeds up to three times with increased levels of retention. Where a normal person reads at ~200-300 words a minute, with these techniques, it is possible to increase the speed to up to ~600-1000 words a minute with a high level of comprehension.”

Figure 28: I am a speed reader

“Ron+, can you tell me more about speed reading?”

“Sure! A key principle in speed reading is being aware of your objective behind reading something. Know what you want, and adapt your reading speed in line with it. Once you are clear on your objective, for instance, you are reading for leisure, or for information, or for improving your own language skills etc., you can decide to choose the pace of reading.”

“Once you are clear on your objective, for instance, you are reading for leisure, or for information, or for improving your own language skills etc., you can decide to choose the pace of reading.”

“Another key principle in speed reading is training your eyes not to stop at every word, but to see more words in every stop to reduce the number of stops you make on a line. This goes hand in hand with breaking the notion that to read something, one needs to hear it in the mind as well. Once you are able to break that, you are set to read a lot more. There are detailed books and software to help you learn this skill. It can make you more productive than you are. Check them out, choose the medium you want to learn it from and incorporate it within your roadmaps.”

“Sure, I will do that!”

Principle 5: Worrying is best done in worry or stress windows

“Although this topic has been touched upon in mind control, let’s talk about it in the context of time management, as it is one of the key areas where people waste their valuable time. To put it in simple words, ‘worrying’ is a bad use of one’s imagination. Like fear, not all of it is futile. Some level of worry or anxiety is good as it motivates us to be better prepared for the event or activity that is making us anxious. For example, if you have an exam or a meeting in the time to come, it is natural to feel anxious. This anxiety will provide you with the necessary motivation to prepare for it. The answer to the question, ‘Is worry or anxiety totally bad for us?’ is really not ‘Yes’. It depends on the degree to which we experience it. If it propels us into action, then it is good. If it makes us dysfunctional, then it is bad as it paralyzes us and sucks the energy out of us. It really boils down to the ability to keep the overall stress or anxiety to a healthy level and this is where mind control can play a key role.”

“Is worry or anxiety totally bad for us? – It depends on the degree to which we experience it. If it propels us into action, then it is good.”

“Let’s also understand what are people really worrying about. Look at yourself and people around you. Are people mostly not worrying about things that never happen eventually, or things that got over in the past and not much can be done about them now anyway? I would easily estimate that ~80-90% of an average person’s worries are unnecessary and waste valuable time. As Mark Twain said, ‘I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened’”

“A simple strategy to get over the stressing habit is to schedule ‘stress or worry windows’, that is, windows of time where you will dedicatedly focus on things that are bothering you or stressing you out. Choose a time around late evening to do this, say before dinner. During the day if something starts to bother you, jot it down into a worry book. It is a good strategy to have a dedicated book called the ‘worry book’. Once you have your worry book with you all the time, your mind is relaxed that the worry has been captured into the book and that it does not have to continue to process it all the time.”

“During the day if something starts to bother you, jot it down into a ‘worry book’”

“This is a very effective strategy and will lead to two improvements in your life:

1. It will make your days more productive as you know you have a dedicated time to worry, thereby eliminating worry from your other daily activities
2. Doing this dedicatedly, will show you its meaninglessness. Over time, you will naturally skip doing it daily and would only do it on days you are really stressed out with many things clouding your thinking. You will begin to appreciate the wise words, ‘Worry is like a rocking chair, it will give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.’

“Yes, I agree!”

“Let’s get into the two powerful exercises around time management.”

Exercise 1: Time spend assessment: Assess what you can do differently

“Make a list of all that you did with your time in the past 7 days and you can use your preferred unit of time. You can do it by one hour if that is what you choose to use. If you are struggling to capture the items properly, it means that you do not work in time windows but are rather quite unorganized. It is perfectly fine. That’s how most untrained people are. Make approximations to complete the exercise. Out of these activities totaling 168 hours in the 7 days, categorize them into the five categories below:

Table 13: Time categories

“When you do this exercise, against each activity, qualify the time taken into regular or unexpected, that is, the activity is regular, but took longer last week than it does usually. To make it clear, there are some activities that usually take certain amount of time and are expected to take the same amount of time in the future. There could be some exceptions in the previous week due to which that activity took more time, for instance,  top management visit to your office for which you had to work more. The idea is to mark out these exceptions clearly.”

“There are only these five windows where a person can spend time. You do not have to do it right now as it might take some time to dig out information. You can complete this exercise later. I will tell you what to do once you fill in the table. Once you have it, assess your table and see what it looks like. Let me give you some observations on how this table typically looks like for successful people:

• An average person might not spend any time in category E. Most successful people spend a lot of time here. They understand the value of sharpening their axes rather than getting tired endlessly trying to get the tree down with a blunt axe
• The distinction between category A and E for successful people is quite less. They recreate themselves in activities that add value to them, for instance, if they want to read a book, they prefer reading a personal development book. If they watch television, they prefer watching something that would help them in their work 
• Another observation that is not explicit from this table but is true is that these windows for successful people are cleaner than those for average people. Since successful people do not mix work and play, whatever time they classify as work is more likely to be work than an average person who classifies ten hours per weekday as work, where typically ~30-40% is social time, spent socializing with colleagues”

“With these observations in mind, analyze your table to see how you can move time from your other categories to category E. This is where spending time can provide you with a significant advantage and increase your effectiveness and efficiency in all other categories. Additionally, strive towards making your windows cleaner. Try to maximize the opportunity of working while you are at work and spending time with family while you are at home. A lot of stress in peoples’ lives comes from having unclean time windows.”

“Strive towards making your time windows cleaner. A lot of stress in peoples’ lives comes from having unclean time windows.”

“You do not have to do this exercise every week, just do it once and it will bring awareness into your conscious and subconscious minds about it. You will start feeling an urge to make better use of your time. Now that you have created so many roadmaps in the previous days, you will automatically live with a sense of urgency and make judicious use of your time. You can repeat this exercise in a few months to check if you are on course. If you seriously work on all the roadmaps you have created till now, you will observe three things in your time spend assessment going forward:

• Your time spent in category A will reduce and move to category E
• Your time spent in categories B, C and D might reduce, not because you will reduce your commitment to your family, socializing or work, but because you are cleaner with your windows and are more mindfully present while you are there
• With all the roadmaps, we are building category E items in your life, so your time spent there will increase significantly. It will continue to enhance the quality of your time spent in B, C and D”

“Sure, got it! I will repeat it in a few months.”

Exercise 2: Plan in advance: Days, months, and years and follow-up on your progress regularly

“Driven by your long-term and five-year vision, you can create a plan for the first year on what you think is feasible in year 1. This will come from activities you define for yourself to achieve your five-year goal in our discussion around ‘Goals’. Do not bother about creating plans for beyond that now. Remember, progress is seldom linear. In fact, this is a mistake that people make when they try to visualize their future selves. They try to extrapolate linearly. Progress comes in step functions, or as I call them, orbits. You cross one to the next one and then onto the next one and so on.”

Figure 29: The orbits of success

“Progress comes in step functions, or as I call them, orbits. You cross one to the next one and then onto the next one and so on.”

“Similar to the magic of writing the goals down, something magical happens when you plan in advance:

• If at the start of the year, you plan key activities that you wish to undertake in this year, you will most likely be able to achieve them in some month or the other
• If at the start of the month, you plan key activities that you wish to undertake in this month, you will most likely be able to achieve them in some week or the other
• If at the start of the week, you plan key activities that you wish to undertake in this week, you will most likely be able to achieve them in some day or the other”

“When you make plans for your day, use time windows as discussed. Create windows of time and strive towards efficiency within them. There is no dearth of planning or organizing or productivity tools in the market. They are available in all formats, from apps on your smart devices to fancy personal organizers available in stationery stores where you can write in with hand if that approach works better for you. Get into the habit of using them.”

“Another consideration in planning the day is when to do the most difficult or critical tasks for the day. Though some people might like doing their toughest task of the day first thing in the morning, in my view, you should start with a few easy ones. Once some positive momentum is created in the first few hours, you can move to the toughest task in the day. Another option that is really not recommended is to keep it till later in the day as the anxiety of having to do that task will linger in the mind, tiring you unnecessarily, thereby reducing your energy by the time you get to that activity.”

“In terms of when to organize your day, the best practice is to plan the next day’s activities the night before. It doesn’t take more than ten to fifteen minutes to create a to-do list for the next day and prioritize what you will do when. In addition to feeling more ‘in-control’ when you wake up in the morning, planning the night before does one more thing. It makes your subconscious mind process information overnight. With that, more often than not, when you start your day, you will have ideas in the morning on how to go about your day that are even better than what you planned. As you continue to work on the plans provided by your subconscious mind and show increased trust in it, you will strengthen its ability to guide you on an ongoing basis.”

“As you continue to work on the plans provided by your subconscious mind and show increased trust in it, you will strengthen its ability to guide you on an ongoing basis.”

“Again, you do not have to do this exercise right away for the month and the year. Start with planning tomorrow’s day today. I am aware that these discussions with me are taking a lot of your time each day these days. You will have more time after tomorrow when I am gone. You can do the exercises for the month and the year aligning all roadmaps you have created in the previous days with all the activities you want to accomplish and the corresponding timelines.”

In line with the principles discussed, Ron starts to work on his plan for the next day, last thing, before calling it a day.