Regardless of the talk about non-renewable resources that goes on everywhere these days, the only non-renewable resource people should worry today is their own time. There are still plenty of other things to go around and the shortage of time has always been there. In this post I will talk about how you can use your time more wisely that will make you more productive helping you to bring more value into your life.
The time’s limitless when you’re young
Everyone in their mid-20s come to realize how quick years start to fly by and how important it is to take the most of them. Remember when you were a child with no worry about hours wasted playing with your friends on the backyard? You thought you had an abundance of time, called 50 years old people grandparents and 30 felt like it would never come. Even the year when you go to college seemed to be in a very distant future back then. The only time your cared about was the time when to come home, because mom told you so.
Our perspective on time starts to change as we grow older. This happens because the relationship of 1 year to our time spent on the Earth gets adjusted. 1 year for a 10 yo accounts for significant 10% of his life, while 1 year for 25 years old – for just 4%. So, what do you do in order to take advantage of every minute of your life?
Take the most of it
I come to realize the following principle of making your time productive when I started working online. Suddenly, all of my time got divided into two states: I add value (yes, knowing the definition of value is important here too) to my business for which I am getting paid for in the first state and I rest in the second one. The trick is to set yourself into the position where you constantly add value to your life even when you don’t do actual work. For example, reading self-help book makes you wiser, while reading a novel makes no difference whatsoever.
Make regular activities productive
Being productive doesn’t mean that you have to give up on things you enjoy doing such as spending time with your friends (friends is one of the things we live for in this world). It means – you have to find ways to make what you do benefit you. In the example with friends, you can reduce the number of times you go out each week. Clearly, you are not getting any more benefit if you go out each day than if you would, say, once a week. However, if you meet your friends once a week it becomes a productive activity because now you take your mind off the work, so you can start fresh and energized the next week.
You can even make watching TV productive. There are many useful documentaries about successful people like Richard Brandson, new trends such as social-networking and other things in life learning of which takes you closer to achieving your dreams. A simple understanding of the difference between educational and entertaining television programs allows you to select useful material.
Still there will be some poisonous activities which you have to eliminate from your life completely, but you already knew about them 🙂
Share how you turned regular activities in your life into productive ones in the comments section as I am sure many can benefit from such examples, me included…