Thread by @warikoo

A thread on managing time...

I have had a wonderful relationship with time, for as long as I can remember. A lot of people graciously ask me "how do you accomplish so much in 24 hours. I don't have time."

And I always have one response...
Who is it that you know who has more time than you do?

We all have the same 24 hours.
It is possibly the ONLY asset that is distributed equally amoungst every human on earth.

Everyone you know, that you are inspired by, awed by, jealous of
has the same 24 hours.

It isn't about time
It something else

Here is my take on it...

Time is an allocation

Time is energy

Time is money

Core Idea No. 1
Time is an allocation

We have all heard of the famous Urgent-Important matrix of time.
I recall reading it first in school, in the book "7 habits of highly effective people"

And being blown away back then by its simplicity

It basically said...

depending on whether something is urgent or not and important or not, you either drop, delegate, schedule or do things right away.

It worked for me, until it didn't...

What if I wanted to spend time with a friend, which is neither urgent nor important
Or maybe watch a movie

If something is not urgent but important AND it won't take a lot of time to finish, why should I schedule it and not do it right away?

The model felt incomplete...

And that is when I changed my approach towards time

I began to do whatever I wanted to do, during a day.
And I began measuring.
Obsessively measuring.

Back in school, I used to record every hour of my day on a notebook
What did I do and which quadrant did it lie in...

Unfortunately I lost all of those notebooks to termite (yeah, I know!)

Thankfully I moved to digital records back in 2005, when I joined ISB

Here are 2 screenshots

Tells me I saw "Scent of a woman" one random October day in 2005 :)

Here is the key part...

This measurement was NEVER to reach a target.

Instead, it was for a distribution to emerge.
A distribution that maximized my performance, my energy and my attention.

Here is my current schedule during the lockdown

and this is what my distribution looks like...

In a week, of my waking hours, I spend

13% of my time on things that are not urgent + not imp
52% of my time on Imp but not urgent
12% on urgent but not imp
23% on things that are both urgent and imp

This is a derivation.
Not a target.

This is an outcome.
It wasn't my goal.

I got to know of this distribution for the first while preparing for a course on Time Management.

And it was fascinating, yet not surprising, to see this split emerge.

This distribution allows me to NOT feel guilty about covering all 4 quadrants.
And maximizes my productivity

And how does it maximize my productivity?

Because this time distribution maximizes my energy...

Which brings me to the 2nd core idea

Time is energy

When people say I do not have time, what they are essentially saying is that I do not have energy.

Physical energy
Emotional energy
Mental energy
Spiritual energy

One's desire to manages time, is one's attempt to manage their energy.

Physical energy:
Quality of your sleep
When and what do you eat
Your fitness

Emotional energy:
Do you have self confidence?
Do you talk positively to your own self?

Mental energy:
Are you creative
Are you optimistic

Spiritual energy:
Do you have integrity, commitment?
Honesty?

If you eat shit and sleep late and lie to yourself that you will fix it tomorrow
It doesn't matter how well you have scheduled yourself for the next day
Your day will be shitty!

It isn't about managing time
It is about managing your energy

So the key is

What distribution of my time across these 4 quadrants of urgent-important maximizes my energy?
And thus maximized my productivity. My performance.

Core Idea No.3
Time is money

25 years back, I used to spend a day in a wholesale market buying books, to save Rs. 100
20 years back, I used to download my music to save money
15 years back, I visited 10+ showrooms to buy a car at the best price

The only goal in life is to...

The only goal in life is to keep increasing the value of your time.

Everyone's time has a value
If you earn a salary, there is a value of every hour of yours.

But we act as if our time is unlimited and thus cheap

If you earn 50K per month and work for 22 days for 8 hours a day, your per hour is Rs. 284.

So if you watch Netflix for an hour a day, the actual cost of Netflix is not 499 per month. It is 9,000 per month!

"But I wasn't working for this hour. So how can you say I could have earned and lost this opportunity?"

Because you could have spent that time in increasing the value of your time.

Something we do not actively think of.

@kunalb11 thinks about time more than most people I know and he speaks a lot about the money value of time.

He thinks most of India's low respect for time stems from our upbringing where we never had jobs that paid us hourly wages as kids.

I agree.

I have had a beautiful relationship with time and have been fortunate that something early on propelled me to think of as a depleting asset.

Think about it
It doesn't matter how much money you have.
You can NEVER buy time.

And yet, we waste time like we will live forever.

If you had Rs. 86,400 you wouldn't waste all of it if someone stole Rs. 400 from you, right?
And yet we do that everyday.
If someone messes us up for 400 seconds, we spend the rest of the day overthinking about it.

I conducted a course on this last month and have been bombarded with requests to make the recording available.

If you liked my thoughts, you might like this 90 min conversation too
rzp.io/l/time-mgmt-re…

Fin.