Taking Charge of Your Time
For the last few weeks, I have been blogging on taking charge of your life because I continue to believe that it’s very important for our world’s future.
Like most of us, I also drifted quite a lot in my life, got lost, wasted a lot of time till I met a very interesting person on a train ride from Jamshedpur to Delhi. It was a very long 42- hour ride. Tthis person was sitting next to me and I was drifting in and out of conversations with him. We were sharing all kinds of irrelevant points of view on all kinds of irrelevant issues. And he said something to me about taking charge of your time as an example of taking charge of your life. I see a lot of young children and young managers today, even experienced managers, drifting in their thinking process. I was wondering if what that gentleman told me about taking charge of your time would be relevant for you to think about as a way of taking charge of your life.
What he said was that when we were born the only real currency we were born with was time. If you consider that, there is a limited amount of that currency which God gave us when we were born, because there has to be a time when we will celebrate our last birthday and go away. Treat that currency as what you are spending, every second, every minute. If that is the only real currency you came with other than your body, which will outlast you anyway, you have to think about who decides to spend that currency. Is that you who is spending the time or is that somebody else who is spending the time? What that thought brought into my mind is that am I taking a conscious decision every time I spend the second? Who do I spend it with, what do I spend it doing and what do I want out of this second, which I have spent? Many people I have related this story to, have come back and told me that it really helps the moment you start thinking about your time as your time and as your conscious choice of spending that time.
A couple of things happen. The first, as in my case also, you start taking responsibility, for outputs rather than just inputs, because it’s your conscious decision of spending time doing one thing and not the other thing. Number two, you start enjoying it more because it’s your conscious decision and you walk away from situations where you think it’s a waste of time because you have consciously - rightly or wrongly - made that decision. And I think the third most important thing is you get really serious about what you enjoy doing because there is no point of spending time on things which you don’t enjoy learning about, thinking about, talking about, listening about, and doing. What’s the point of doing those things, which you really don’t enjoy? My belief is that if you find that zone of confidence and the zone of enjoyment, you will find huge amount of success.
A question, which I have been asked multiple times is: Are people who make a conscious decision about spending their time selfish? My belief is that when God gave us currency as time, he also built a heart around us, which feels extremely good in giving. Therefore, if you imagine your life being spent as ten percent of time that you control, eighty percent of time that you drift, and maybe twenty or ten percent of time with somebody else’s control - you would understand that the biggest waste of time is not what somebody else controls, but the time of drift.
And if you feel good about giving - I have seen wherever people start taking conscious choices of spending time, they feel good about giving - they start spending time in areas where they can share, they can give, they can participate, they can contribute, because that makes them feel good.
So taking charge of your time does not mean that you begin introspecting, you become selfish, you lock yourself in the room. Actually it means that you take charge of your time and spend it in giving because that’s what makes you feel good, or learning because that’s what motivates you, and doing because that’s the zone of huge amount of comfort for you. So think about it.
If any of you had an experience that by controlling your time and taking those conscious decisions, you were able to take charge of your life, I would be very interested. We all will be very interested to hear your stories and think about it collectively.
