Is it me or has this year started as fast as the last. My family used to say the older you get the faster the year goes. This made no sense to me, as there were still 365 days in the year, (OK so this year has 366), and 24 hours in a day. This has not changed and will not change in the foreseeable future. Why this saying? Why does time seem to move faster?
The point is that time does not go any faster; we are good at apportioning blame for our own inefficiencies. Our perception comes from how we use our time; we do not plan and therefore try to fit far too much stuff into a day. We start the 'time mantra' I am too busy, I do not have enough time, I wish the days were longer, I can't do this, there is not enough time.
As we get older, we make choices to do things that take up our time, often unwisely and without a plan or thought of the consequences.
Technology has helped and hindered us in the ability to estimate how long things take. Have you ever said, "I'll just send a quick email"? It is my experience that there is no such thing as a quick email. You open your email and there are one or two new emails sitting there, which of course have to be read and answered. Then we ask ourselves what did I sit down to do? Where has the time gone?
In today's world a lot of trade is done on the internet. 'Please go to my website to buy my products', we see this advertising more and more, so off we go. I have a spare minute I will just go to the website and have a look, before you know it; you are going through the buy now procedure which takes an age and leaves you absolutely drained, assuming that it worked first time. You look up and find that another 30 minutes has just ticked by and where did the time go!
This happens over and above the things that we have to do in the day, like meeting our family commitment, kids who want everything now! One of my grand kids just sat down and stuck her foot on my desk, with the expectation that I would stop everything to look at her foot! She was obviously of the opinion, that if I did not do this right now, it would somehow detach itself from her leg and disappear.
We have work to do, and productivity has reduced not increased. We seem to take longer to get to market with new products; we have work groups that are quite in effective because of the poor time choices. We have managers who do not respect their own time, and therefore, quite happily waste the time of their team members.
So what can we do? What must we do? We have to take charge we have to empower ourselves to rise above temptation, we have to overcome that four letter swear word present in a lot of business and PLAN, i.e. have to Plan for our time.
Let's get back to basics and help ourselves
To
Inspire
My
Effectiveness
Let's achieve the things that we have only dreamed of, let us be the master of time rather than a victim of the clock.
Ross Kennedy lives and works in Auckland New Zealand, he is a Personal and Professional Development Specialist and a distributor for Success Motivation Institute New Zealand http://www.successmotivation.co.nz and helps people in business to improve productivity through changing habits and attitudes.
Ross can also be contacted through http://www.success-motivation.com
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