It was year 2002. I started my Master’s program. During that time all of master’s students have to take a mandatory course called “Skills Development Workshop”.
It sounds quite boring at that time as we were expecting lots of lectures and advices to do things like that, don’t do this, don’t do that bla bla…
On our very first lecture the first thing our professor told us was to write down what we do daily. And then the first time we thought what actually we do whole day :)
Wake up, Breakfast, office, work, lunch, payers, university, attend lectures, chit chat etc etc.
Then he told us now mention how much time you spend on all of these individual activities.
It was quite surprising, as none of us ever noticed before that how much time we spend on our daily activities.
Then what our professor told us was one of the major things which I always feel is the key thing for me in my life and success.
He said “From now on you have to plan your day and assign time to each of your activity, and try to make sure that whatever time you are assigning to one activity do that within that time period. Always keep a backup time for everything. And be Realistic.”
We start this exercise; initially this was very tough and most of us were not able to finish our tasks on our own assigned time. Major reason was, we never think of how much time we spent on this activity so our estimates goes wrong.
After few days of exercise we come to know what could be more realistic time to do each activity. These exercises totally change our lives. We feel that we waste lots and lots of our time without any reason.
It’s been almost 8 years now, and I still remember those words. And even today I manage my time efficiently. Time is the only thing in the world that is distributed to every one equally now it’s up to you how you utilize that.
Some time it seems it’s quite a simple thing and might not affect anything in our daily routine or life pattern. But believe me once you adopt this exercise you know the benefits. You yourself feel the difference. It will not only increase your productivity but also give you enough time to do more work in lesser time.
You can find lots of Time management techniques and books over the internet which gives you lots and lots of information, but what I mentioned is from my personal experience. Hope its will help you at some extent to change your life.
