The time management series 1: start o'clock
What's the only resource that we all have, we can't consume and can't be saved but can be wasted?
If you said time, that's right. Time is infinite, although, our time is limited. We need to sleep, eat and work and all of that consumes time, that leaves us with a more limited amount of time to do other things. We can't control the speed time passes by, but we can control the things we do during the time we have.
What we do with our time can makes us or break us. Can get us that promotion we are longing for or can get us fired, can strengthen our relationships with our friends or our family or can tear us apart and put light years of distance between us.
Time is like money in many ways. If we waste money, we can't get it back, the only thing we can do is being smarter in the way we use it in the future. If we invest money, we get more money, which in a way gives us freedom. If we invest time, we don't get more time back in a sense of more years of live, but it can also give us freedom. That why, same as with money, we need to be smart in how we use our time.
There's one book that really changed the way I think about time and how I use it and it's Master your Time, Master your life, by Brian Tracy, it explains that all the different activities we do in our life, pertain to different categories and those categories require a different way of time management according to that type of time.
Types of time
In his book, Tracy, recommends allocating our time into 10 different categories:
- Strategic planning and goal-setting time
- Productive time
- Income improvement time
- Spare time
- Work time
- Creative time
- Problem-solving and decision-making time
- People and family time
- Rest and relaxation time
- Quiet time
I know, it seems like a lot, but once we get a hang of it, everything becomes very intuitive.
In the upcoming posts in this series of Time Management I'll go deeper into each type of time with some members-only sections.