If I asked you what is the main asset you have, what would you answer? Her house? her car? Your factory? Most likely the last answer he would give would be: his time. However, I think this should be the first or at least the second answer, after health.
Time is the most powerful asset we have and the only non-renewable resource of humanity, at least until the time machine is invented. However, this is also the most wasted resource, especially in big cities where it is supposedly scarce, where everyone complains about the lack of time and where everyone wastes it.
Our society is immersed in unproductive progress, as Gabriel Zaid rightly says. Paradoxically, an asset as valuable and as scarce as time, is wasted in our big cities in automobile traffic, in bad transportation, in useless meetings, in unnecessary guards, in long lines, in TV commercials, and inconsequential programs, and generally in unsuccessful or duplicate activities. Much of it largely as a consequence of mismanagement and inability to discern between the urgent and the important and the important and inconsequential.
For example, entire lives are wasted every day in Mexico City traffic. A conservative estimate tells us that 4.4 million people spend an average of 3 hours a day on the daily commute from home to work, school or another activity; and taking into account that the life expectancy of Mexicans is 74.6 years, that is to say 653.5 thousand hours, the 960 million man hours spent daily in our city of pavement are actually almost 15 lives "murdered" a day, what that profiles us as one of the greatest genocides in history.
Seen from another perspective, in Mexico City, each person uses an average of 750 hours a year in traffic or transportation from home to work and back. With this time, almost 20 training courses, 5 diplomas, 10 levels of a foreign language course could be studied; You could read 37 books, run 187 marathons in Mexico City; Or more importantly, you could share thousands of teachings and adventures with your children or old people, as the Argentines say, or take a full month's vacation.
The waste of time seems so irreparable to us that we do nothing to change anything. Even when there are viable alternatives. For example, those generated by new information technologies, such as teleworking and online shopping, better time management, the development of staggered schedules, the search for alternative transport schemes, etc.
As Jorge Luis Borges once said, when we are in the last minutes of our lives we will surely know with greater precision the infinite value of time, and surely we will not want to dedicate it to work or driving on the streets or seeing slops of “Reallity Show ”, There will be other priorities such as family, good friends, spiritual encounter, etc.
To be not only effective but also happy we must know how to manage time. We must measure time without having to resort to a clock. We must control and measure exactly the time we spend on each thing. We must be able to distribute our time and that of others.
Brian Tracy in his book "Swallow That Toad" provides us with some good techniques to improve the management of our time; I share with you some of them:
The first step is to decide exactly what you want. One of the worst uses of time, says Tracy, is to do something very well that there was no need to do.
The second step is to write it. It is very important to think on paper, because when you write an objective it crystallizes. Setting a deadline for your goal is the next essential step, since a goal or a decision without a deadline is not urgent. It has no true beginning or end.
As a fourth step - the book "Swallow That Toad" advises us - make a list of everything you can think about what you will have to do to achieve the goal. Followed by this, as a fifth step, organize the list as a plan. Decide what to do before something else and what you can do afterwards. An elephant is eaten bite by bite, divided into specific step-by-step activities, and begins with the first.
Planning each day in advance allows us to get the most benefit from our investment of mental, emotional and physical energy. For Brian Tracy, acting immediately on plan, as a sixth step, is essential. A normal and vigorously executed plan is much better than a brilliant one with which nothing is done.
The 10/90 law says that the first 10% of the time you spend planning and organizing your work before you start will save you up to 90% of the time you will take to do the job.
Another highly relevant piece of advice that Brian Tracy provides us is to develop the ability to choose between the important and the unimportant. The Pareto Law applied to time says that 20% of its activities are worth 80% of its results. The time it takes to do something important is the same time it takes to do something unimportant.
The key is to study the consequences of what we are going to do, what is not important has little or no potential long-term consequences. If an activity has major consequences, whether positive or negative, then it must take precedence.
Finally Brian Tracy suggests that we continually practice the ABCDE method… which is a powerful priority-setting technique.
Always work with a list. Start the list of what to do the next day and write an A, B, C, D, E in front of each item on the list before starting the first task.
Subject A is something very important, and if you have more than one task A you can do a group of subpriorities: A1, A2, A3… etc. Issue B is something you should do but its consequences are only slight. You should never do task B if task A is pending. Issue C is something that would be nice to do but whose consequences are non-existent.
A task D is something that you can delegate to someone else, the rule is to delegate everything that someone else can do. An E task is something you can delete without it mattering in the least. It is often something that continues to be done out of simple habit. The key to making it work is that you discipline yourself right now to start task A1 and stick with it until you complete it.
As the day progresses, put a signal to the items on the list you have specified. Having a visual picture of achievements gives the feeling of success and progress, motivates and increases your energy.
I hope these suggestions are useful to you, they have worked quite well for me. Remember that when it comes to time, we are talking about a non-renewable resource. As David Konzevik, Strategic Consultant to the World's Leading Companies, says: Be very careful when you ask someone for their time, because they are asking for your life.
