168 hours work-week

Often we complain about how we always have a time crunch. The truth is, we always have more than enough time. We feel a time crunch because we fail to do two things:

• We fail to segment time or create healthy boundaries
• We focus on managing time rather than energy

New Year is a New Cycle

It's New Year's time, and many people get into a debate about whether to have resolutions. People debate why to wait for the new year to start something afresh.

While I agree with both the point of view that we don't need any special occasion to celebrate, start something new, or make a new resolution, we must also understand that our life is predominantly a cycle of many things. And whenever there is a start of a new cycle, we want the outcome to be always better than the previous one. And that's all that is.

We know that one cycle of 365 days is over. Now it's the time of yet another cycle of 365 days. In this new cycle of 365 days, we want to avoid everything that didn't work in the previous cycle, which is a wise thing to do.

So New Year is just about that, it's a new cycle, and we all want to ensure that we become a better version of ourselves; we achieve everything we aspire and take charge of our lives.

The cycle of 24 hours

One of the cycles that we all tend to get stuck into is how we use our time and energy every day. Time and energy are two critical essential ingredients that help us move towards our goals. Our new year resolutions are always about new plans, but quite often, we ignore the process of reaching our goals. And because we ignore the process, our outcomes are never what we desire.

I will talk about the energy factor in a separate post. I want to restrict this post to the first ingredient, time. There is an umpteen number of people I have come across, and the single most common excuse I have heard of not achieving their goal is the paucity of the time. I have observed that they have not just been frivolous about time, but they are also unconscious of how they spend their time.

Is the paucity of time real?

I believe in the idea of not micromanaging every activity because it becomes a bit tiring over time. Instead, it helps to create buckets of different activities over the week and then let yourself free to shuffle these buckets as the week goes by. We should also not enforce particular actions in that specific activity bucket because that jeopardizes the entire purpose of creating the bucket if we falter.

Let me give you an example if you spend one hour every day learning new things, and what you're learning is not helpful for you, you will lose faith soon. Ultimately, you will start believing that the whole system doesn't work for you.

You always have more time than you think ...

When you aggregate your activities into meaningful segments, you will notice that you have fewer things to deal with. For example, in the Office hours segment, you are only focussing on the tasks that needed to be done related to your office. But if you don't segment your time, you will have 100s of activities or tasks to plan. Managing 100s of activities will drain you out, and you will eventually feel a failure.

When I segment my activities, I get 25% of hours in a week, i.e., almost 5 hours in a day where I am free and do whatever I want. These 5 hours I have got after taking care of all the activities I am supposed to do. Isn't that amazing?

Creating segments helps you create boundaries in which you can focus on a particular type of task. For example, you can shut everything down during your family time and only focus on the time you spend with your loved ones.

The paradox

Doing calculations on a spreadsheet is one thing, and reality is another. It appears as if we have much more time, but what happens when we start living the day?

We tend to lose track and get stuck or lost in something that we had never imagined. You had planned to take a course on Udemy, eventually ended up binging on Netflix. You wanted to do a workout but ended up spending more time scrolling social media. This is how we lose our focus and live with a feeling of the paucity of time.

We shouldn't manage time; instead, we should manage energy. Excitement, fear, boredom, enthusiasm, and plenty of other emotions which we feel are a certain kind of energy. The paradox here is that we know we have time but don't understand where it fleets, simply because we never pay attention to our power. And energy is neither created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed. The energy that you spend binge-watching Netflix has to be transformed into taking a course on Udemy. The transformation of this energy is the real challenge.

All you need to know

While we all have our way of handling life and the time we spend, one thing remains the same for all of us; activities are the content of our life, the more we engage in conscious and purposeful activities, the better direction we can steer our life. The amount of time is the same for all of us, whether you are the CEO of a company or someone with an entry-level job.

• 168 hours of the week, brings many possibilities in your life, don't waste them
• Divide 168 hours of the week into segments
• Segments of time give you the freedom to alter the individual activities within the segment.
• Try to be busy rather than occupied.

Leave your thoughts in the comments. I would love to know how you deal with time.