Time Management By Angela Mugo

Time Management A few days ago, I attended a seminar where we learnt about time management. The facilitator gave us...


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Time Management

A few days ago, I attended a seminar where we learnt about time management. The facilitator gave us sticky notes of assorted colors and had us write in them in markers. We were asked to write how we spent the last week. What we spent it doing and allocate each activity the number of hours spent on each of the sticky notes. Afterwards he asked us to go a whiteboard and stick them where we felt was appropriate. The whiteboard was divided into four quadrants, important and urgent, important but not urgent, not important and not urgent and not important and urgent. He then asked us to look at the board and say honestly what we noticed.

He then asked us what our goals in life are. There were terrific answers with people wanting to be big shots in their fields, others to have successful businesses, others to make an impact in society, while many wanted to end up just being happy. He stuck that right next to the quadrant of time management. Then he asked us whether we thought we could achieve our goals spending our time the way we were. Our quadrant was filled with leisure activities like watching TV, reading novels, sleeping and so on.

As I sat back and thought about it and evaluated my life, I realized how true this was. He argued that we were young and in the prime of our youth. We had energy, we had zeal and we were flexible. Right now was the time to be out in the world starting our businesses and making all the mistakes while we still could. Right now was our time to try every career we thought we wanted to. It was the time to be learning new languages; new crafts and meeting networks that would help us achieve our goals. Instead, we have been reduced to zombies sitting in front of TV sets, binge watching anything we can get our hands on.

See, my personal definition of passion is something that you love doing, what makes you tick. Ultimately your passion should yield your goal. A goal is what you ultimately want to achieve, the whole reason for being alive. It should be your driving force, when you are lazy you should think about how far you have to go and jolt up and start working. Every single decision you make should be a step in that direction. I do however appreciate that sometimes we can get so caught up in existing that we forget to live. We can be out here doing things that will not make a difference in our lives. Sadly sometimes, we fall off so much that we populate our lives with that only. Personally, I am guilty of spending a whole day watching a TV series I don’t even like, all the while knowing I have work to do. It seems harmless at the time but when you look at your goals you will realize you have not even a single minute to spare. Take this challenge with me; spend a day indoors watching TV and then another doing something constructive. At the end of the day, take some time and listen to your body and mind. When you feel better? See, our bodies are inclined to cheat our minds to lie around and not push ourselves to be productive. It has to be a conscious effort; we have to push ourselves if we want anything done.

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