Manage Time and Move to a Whiter Square
A basic part of practicing your responsibility in leading your life is to be the master of your own time who decides how it should be used and how the day should go. You should avoid wasting your time on those things that consume a lot without a significant return and focus on being productive in the things that really matter to you.
Being productive here is a general concept, and it is not just about your job. Anything you do and it serves your own vision and plans – whatever they are – is a productive activity, and the final definition of that depends on you and your own vision for life.
Identifying your interests, roles and priorities makes you more aware of your obligations and duties, and helps you to start accepting the unavoidable influence of the surrounding world and the limitations it will eventually set for you (at least for the current time). You will have to start adapting to that in such a way that preserves most of your ability to choose what to do, how, and when, by managing your time on the basis of short time periods. That would make you able to manage easily up to 60% of your time without much effort, and you can even achieve more than that but with more effort and some sacrifice.
You can start by setting the targets you are willing and able to achieve at the same time within the coming short period, and then translate that into a practical short-period plan that takes into account your obligations, and the expected interrupts and challenges.
The time frame for such a plan should range between one week and one month depending on what you feel would be better for your current circumstances. Once the time is up, repeat the process again with a new plan for a new period, and so on...
Now, making those plans more organized and efficient would certainly need you to rearrange your daily life activities and asses everything you do, whether it was obligatory or voluntarily, then setting the priorities for all of them. In general, you have to try as much as possible to widen the area of the activities that belong to your higher priorities and narrow the area of the other activities on the map.
A famous equation says that we do 80% of the things that really matter to us within only 20% of our time, while the remaining 20% of those things consume the remaining 80% of our time. So, if you can get rid of these 20% as much as possible, then you will save as much as 80% of your time and still be accomplishing at least 80% of the matters that interest you.
Practically, it is hard to reach such a level in reality, but it is relatively possible in normal conditions to achieve a level where 50% of your time is being used on the things that really matters to you. You might think it is not really a big increment, but you would find that it makes a huge difference in both your efficiency and your feeling of comfort. Also, it would decrease significantly the number and the size of the problems that knock on your door every day.
Before I continue, it is necessary to assure you here that recreation and having a moderate level of fun is not a waste of time, it is essential and needed. So, when it comes to that the point here will be to decide what belongs to that useful moderate level and what is beyond that and should be considered a real waste of time.
Anyway, that is not the hardest part yet, as you will still have to make a difficult distinction and choose between things that all belong to your Effective Influence Zone but with different priorities. Depending on the circumstances, you would have to dispense some of the lower priorities, either fully or partially. So, you will need to consider what you can afford to dispense and what you cannot. Also, you should consider the gradual dispense of those activities that should be dispensed, but you are unable to do it immediately; in the worst case, you should mark them to be dispensed later once it is possible. That is a normal part of life, and the ability to take such decisions is a basic skill of every successful person.
One of the things that would help you to learn and practice that skill effectively is to understand a simple strategy that can be called “Moving to a Whiter Square”.
We can draw a simple map for the efficiency of our time utilization depending on the nature of the activities in which we spend our time in terms of being Important/Unimportant, Urgent/Non-urgent, and Obligatory/Not-Obligatory. Each one of the activities you do in your life takes a position in one of the eight squares of this map.
Judging something for being Important/Unimportant depends on whether it provides a significant return with respect to your vision and targets or not. So when something has no real significant return, then it is Unimportant. Saying that something is Urgent means that it cannot be delayed for whatever reason. Deciding whether something is Obligatory or not depends on how much you are willing and ready to pay the required cost to stop doing that activity, and get rid of it. As you are more willing to do that, the activity becomes less obligatory, and vice versa. If you do not mind paying the cost to get rid of that activity whenever you want, that means that the decision of performing that activity is mainly yours because you can stop at any moment and pay the cost. On the other hand, if you cannot or are not willing to pay the cost, then you have no choice but to perform that activity, which makes it Obligatory.
The real dark hell will be when you fail to organize your time and priorities and fall in that area where you spend most of your time doing things that are Unimportant, Urgent, and Obligatory at the same time, so you can say that you are wasting almost 100% of your time and energy here. In this dark area, problems consider you their favorite host. They will not just keep visiting you frequently, but probably they will get a permanent residence visa and consider your life their home where they can grow, get bigger, reproduce, and give you more of the cute little problems.☺
On the other hand, the best use of time is when you spend the most of your time doing Important, Non-urgent, Non-obligatory activities (of whatever kind), which means that you are utilizing almost 100% of your time by doing important things that do not constitute pressure on you and give you a feeling of freedom and choice.
The more you organize your activities in accordance with your concerns and priorities, the more you are able to get free from the urgent, unimportant and obligatory activities. However, you would still need to review periodically the activities you do in your daily life and reassess them according to their location on the efficiency map and the time that each one of them consumes.
It would be necessary to rearrange your life and activities gradually, so you would dispense — as much as possible — those activities that pull you to the darker squares or at least set limits for them. Again, this probably will call for some sacrifices, as you must make appropriate eliminations over time for the activities that waste your time (Unimportant), or put a pressure on your agenda (Urgent), or you cannot usually avoid them (Obligatory).
The target here is to spend more time on the most effective areas of the map, so you would be able to focus on what is truly valuable to you (Important), do not cause a pressure (Non-urgent), and gives you the feel of choice, freedom, and pleasure as you do not feel compelled to do it (Non-obligatory).
This means that as much as possible, you should generally move your daily activities over time so that most of them are in whiter squares than you used to be in before.
