There is one principle nature uses as an instrument to regulate all mankind. It’s equally distributed, perishable; expensive; measurable; continuous; irreversible; and irreplaceable, making it very valuable. There are things you can’t do with it. You can’t invest or save it. You can’t buy it, borrow it, steal it, manufacture it, and modify it. Also, it flies, it is money, it marches on, it heals all wounds and it waits for no man. By now, I know most people are wondering what this principle is. I also know that others would ‘ve guessed correctly that I’m talking about time. In your bid to create wealth, you must be a good time manager.
Consider these three general truths about time. You will never find time for anything; if you want time, you must make it; and of course, you cannot add until you subtract. Bob Richards, a former Olympic pole vault champion, said that he spent over ten thousand hours practicing the pole vault. After the Olympics, Bob accurately observed that a person can be good at anything he puts ten thousand hours into. One of my secrets about time is what I call “The Art of Combining.” It means at each point in time, I’m trying to do two things at the same time. For instance, driving and listening to motivational tapes in the car. Reading or writing while waiting to catch a flight, etc. Herbert Hoover wrote a book during the time he spent waiting in railroad stations. Noel Coward wrote his popular song, “I’ll See You Again,” while caught in a traffic jam. A magazine recently conducted a time study of eighteen executives in fourteen companies. They found that these executives spent an average of five and one-half hours a day in conversation. The conclusion was that executives have enough time to accomplish their goals, they just don’t use it. Remember each of us has just as much time available as Tolstoy did when he wrote War and Peace. Each of us has just as much time as Edison had when he invented the light bulb. Likewise other great achievers; they had just the same twenty-four hours like most of us. Most of the books I’ve read were done travelling. There are people who just don’t care how they spend their time. I remember the story of a man who moved to a new city and went looking for a church to join. He visited several churches and was having a hard time finding one where he felt comfortable. Just when he was about to give up, he passed by a church, looked in, and heard the preacher say, “We have left undone those things, which we ought to have done. And we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” The newcomer immediately settled into a pew and, with a deep sigh of relief, said to himself, thank God! I’ve found my crowd at last.
Michael LeBoeuf, in his book, The Perfect Business said, “The term time management is a real misnomer, because time is totally unmanageable. It’s a resource constantly being depleted at a predictable rate – 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. All we can do is manage ourselves in a way that will make effective use of time.”
John Erskine, a well – known author and professor, once wrote that he learned the most valuable lesson of his life when he was only fourteen years old. It came from his piano teacher. “How many times a week do you practice, and how long do you practice each time?” The teacher asked.
John replied that he usually tried to practice once a day, generally for an hour or more. The teacher warned, “Don’t do that. When you grow up, time won’t come in long stretches. Practice in minutes, wherever you can find them – five, ten, before school, after lunch, or between chores. Spread your practice throughout the day, and music will become a part of your life.”
Looking back, John saw that advice as a good formula against “burn out.” He also saw it as a way to live a complete life as a creative writer, apart from his regular teaching duties. He wrote the bulk of his most famous work, Helen of Troy, while commuting between his home and the university. If we live 65 years, we have about 600,000 hours at our disposal. Assuming we are 18 when we complete secondary school, we have 47 years or nearly 412,000 hours to live after graduation. If we spend 8 hours a day sleeping, 8 hours for personal, social, and recreational activities, and 8 hours for working, that amounts to 137,333 hours in each category. When we think of the time we have to work and play in terms of hours, it doesn’t seem like much. And when seen in the light of eternity, it’s but a fleeting moment. I have had a number of people asking to be guided on how to write the book of their dream. My first question is: What do you do? How many hours do you spend at work? What do you do with the rest of the time? Etc. At the end of the day, the problem is not that they don’t know what to write, but that they do not have time to write the book. One principle not known to many is that you can actually add more hours to your 24 hours a day. I will explain. If your normal time of getting up is 6:30am to prepare for work, get the kids ready for school or any other way, it could be changed to 6:00am. The answer would not be far fetched. If you could write or read for 30 minutes a day and you do it for one week, what that means is that you’ve added 30 minutes times 7, which is 3 hours 30 minutes to your time. What you need to manage here is yourself, not the time. How would you like to add another month to every year of your life? Impossible, you say? Not at all. Listen to this: If you set your alarm to wake you up a half hour earlier, six days a week, you’d gain an extra three hours a week… three hours that you could use to read… to exercise… or to spend with your loved ones. You do that 52 weeks a year and you’ve added 156 productive hours to your year. That’s the equivalent of adding almost a month of 40 – hour weeks to your year! Now think about it. Over a lifetime, that extra half-hour every day would add almost four years of 40 – hour work weeks to your life! Most people don’t know this, but it’s true that regardless of what you do, your product and/or service, what you’re really selling is your time. Everybody sells time in the marketplace. Time management system works if you’re well focused, know what you’re trying to accomplish, and stick to it. There are six ways to improve your time. Analyze time spent. Clarify priorities. Create a planning system. Prefer the important first. Jump to it with an early start. And do it now. Remember the words of Samuel Smiles as you get along today. “Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.”
You will succeed.
Shalom!