The Scarcest thing on earth or somewhere else in universe, is Time. Yet, this is the most ignored asset with us. The time resource does not follow supply-demand curve. Time worth increases, as we give more importance to it. Each and every one of us has many dreams. Some of us, do take them seriously and aspire to achieve them with great efforts. Somehow, we always strive hard for the time to invest in. This makes Time Management a very important topic to discuss.

Fact is, we all have only 24 hours in a day. It all depends on how we use those available 24 hours. We will hear from others about to-do list, prioritising etc. a lot for improving time management. Despite of having all this tools in our archery, we fail to achieve our goal. So, where are we lacking?

The answer to this question is worth evaluating, as this will give us, the key for proper time management.

Human mind is a multidimensional computer, which keeps on thinking about various things each moment. Being this powerful, it become important to organise our thinking process as per present requirement. Remember, in a computer operated machines, we can schedule tasks as per requirement. Few tasks are executed daily, few once a week, few one a month and so on. This is done to use the speed of machine optimally, so that the most important tasks do not suffer.  

Similar to this, our mind has thousands of task, which it performs voluntarily or involuntarily. The involuntary tasks are not our direct control and can be left out for this topic as of now. The voluntary tasks can be further sub divided in deliberate and undeliberate or conscious and sub-conscious tasks. If we are making a to do list, this is can be categorised a conscious or deliberate task, but if we are doing social browsing or checking notification  every 10 minutes, this can be sub conscious tasks, which your brain had got trained to do. Another example is driving your car to office, which you are doing consciously. While driving to office, listening to music can be a sub conscious task, which has now become a habit.

Therefore, this can be derived that, the subconscious tasks are basically habits, which has been cultivated after doing conscious tasks again and again.

Nothing wrong with surfing social sites or listening to music, but somehow, mind has lost track of how much time is getting used into it. Habits can be good or bad. And it is very important to keep track of these to fine tune our future activities.

Thus, it is very important to be in driving seat of mind control.

This may seems to be idealistic or hypothetical at one time, but remember, this is your mind & you are the best and only person in this universe, who know it best and can do something about it.

Few of the tools and tricks to organize your mind and work in a focused way are as below:

1. Job at hand: The to do list is the best tool. You should always know, what all jobs are pending with you. Always, keep the list handy and review it daily. This will keep on impinging your mind that you cannot waste time and you have really important tasks to do.
2. What to do first: Use the prioritization tools like pareto 80-20 rule, Johari window etc. This will help you be more effective with the available time.
3. Be energetic : Healthy body and healthy mind, both are very much important for most productive mind control. Keep your mind at peace. Do whatever is keeping you healthy and happy.
4. Use Technology: Technology is made for helping us out, while opposite is happening in most of us. We are becoming slaves of technology. We have alarm/reminder facility in our phones and then we have a button called snooze, which most of the times diminishes the very purpose of configuring that particular alarm. Let’s use technology for our overall benefits. Let’s mute all notifications of applications in our phones, accept the emergency ones. Mark my words, this will improve your focus by 70-80 percent. There are many other ways like automating repetitive tasks, using advanced excel functions, organizing your folders in computer, Managing mails effectively and so on. Let’s explore new ways of exploiting technology for our overall benefits.
5. Be Disciplined: We are good initiators of these tools but get easily drifted from control line. While driving on highway with heavy traffic, you cannot enjoy beauty of trees on road side, as life is at stake. One small mistake can result in heavy damage. Thus, we are forced to focus on the road instead. When at home or at office, when lingering tasks do not have such risks, we tend to lose focus very often. So, it is very important to be sincere and disciplined. Our focus shall not lose sight of the jobs at hand.

These are only few & the most generic methods to experiment with. We can further evolve on ideas, as we have better understanding of our mind. Let the focus be alive all the time.

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