Do You Manufacture Time?
Why I look at time as an essential commodity: A Series
Welcome Note and Introduction
Welcome to my productivity series. This series aims to give you all the productivity hacks that I am learning in my entrepreneurial journey.
Who should read this?
- You are someone who respects time,
- You want to conserve your energy,
- You are troubled with time management.
Let us begin with why I felt it necessary to increase my efficiency.
My necessity to tackle this issue
I am a solo entrepreneur. I need to keep track of everything — from daily household chores to doing something that will make the day count. Anything which drains my time pushes me away from my goals. If I overindulge in irrelevant tasks, I will need to pack off my projects!
Ask yourself why do you feel the necessity to save time?
How did I start?
For a long time, I was thinking about purchasing a hard disk. Data is wealth, and one should not let the strings loose when it comes to data.
My laptop is now a decade old. It is running well, but even the insurance companies distrust the aged. How then should I assure its longevity? But I let the days pass.
It was a fine day. I was about to purchase hosting for my new venture. I pressed the start button, and the laptop sounded beep-beep-beep-beep and so on. I took it to a local service center. I do not know what mischief the man did to my gadget. But after playing for a week, he declared it useless. I was disappointed.
The hard disk contained all my work. With a scared tone, I asked, “Is my data safe?” The person gave no assuring response.
I was not going to let the data go at any cost. So I got it recovered from the data recovery experts. I was fortunate that I got back my years of work. But this entire process took me a couple of weeks and an amount of 1/5th the price of the laptop.
To an entrepreneur or even a disciplined person, time is the essence. He would not waste it on worthless activities.
This mess was avoidable if I have had listened to my intuitions. I could have purchased a hard disk. Along with the wasted time, I also spent a hell of embodied energy in transit, fear, and worries.
A lost couple of weeks taught me a timeless lesson about securing data. Going a step ahead, I decided to work on every aspect of my life. So I backed up the data and started saving every moment. I learned to become proactive.
This series of articles is my experimentations with time and data management. If you want to live a highly productive life, then this series is worth your time.
Let us begin with the basics.
Introduction: How you drain your time
Have you felt anxious at times when you got stuck somewhere where you didn’t want to spend your time? And then regretted later for your wasted minutes and hours. I felt a lot like this each day when I scrolled social sites, or watched a boring cinema, or got into a prolonged unwanted ‘you need to listen to my boring chatter’ conversation.
In essence, it is a waste of precious time. Such instances pull us away from our targets, don’t they?
They are called time drainers.
A time drainer is something or someone which eats your time. You feel regret after you spend time in that activity. It may be a habit, a person, or an uncertain event. While you can straightaway say no to a person, you cannot avoid uncertainty hitting you on any of your workdays.
Time drainers can be either
- Self-made habits
- Outside events
We can defend the Self-made drainers with our willpower and healthy habits. They are controllable
However, we have no control over Outside events. We cannot eliminate them, but we can mitigate them.
The concept of Manufacturing Time
Manufacturing time is nothing unusual. It’s what business people do. They pay employees to do their work. This way, they save a lot of time. They use this manufactured time to create more valuable assets.
At a personal level, we can manufacture time if we can save it. We can invest that time in high-priority tasks.
As the Pareto principle goes, you should invest your time in 20% of activities that will help you attain 80% outcomes.
Gratitude to the previous generation and cheers to our times
In the 21st century, you have already saved much of your time which the earlier generations were obliged to perform.
It includes –
- Household chores- With the help of Electricity and gadgets
- Travel-A bicycle/public transport/personal vehicle
- Bill payments | messaging | mails | banking — Computers
- Waking up | Dictionary | Learning — Mobile Phones
- Food — Cloud Kitchens
Even though technology has saved us a lot of time, there remains more space to increase your efficiency each day.
Let us dive into the details:
1) 7 Promising Habits That Will Make You Super Productive.
2) 20 Tips To Increase Your Productivity Using Physical Unclutter.
3) 12 Tips On How To Save Yourself From Digital Troubles.
4)6 Quick Boosters To Increase Your Efficiency.
5) I Made 100s Of Timetables And Never Followed Any. Yet I was productive.
6) Get Away From Unnecessary People.
7) How To Ditch The Morning Yawn Bombs At Work.
