…your time management skill is a direct reflection of how much you value yourself.

Beyond how much you respect yourself, how well you manage your time shows how much you love yourself.

We all have 24 hours every day, the same 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour. It does not matter how beautiful you are or the number of degrees earned, we all are given 7 days a week.

Time, I would say, is the fairest resource of all. Evenly distributed without bias. The poor, the rich, the ugly and the beautiful, man or woman, we all are given the same measure.

It, therefore, reflects on our value of self-worth when we abuse time. If truly I love myself, I would understand that I need to get enough sleep. Yet before I get enough sleep, I must factor in that I have to get work done because there are unmerciful bills that must be cleared and self-development to attain. Also, I must create time each day to enjoy life and relax.

Beyond the damage poor time management has on our minds, increasing our stress levels, it could also manifest physically. Stress resulting from poor time management can lead to breakouts on our skin, deterioration of our health and other worse physical conditions.

One of the reasons we do not manage our time properly may be tied to poor management of our emotions. This, greatly worsened by the advancement of technology, has gradually turned into a monster disguising itself as pleasure.

Beyond social media we sometimes find ourselves caught up in long worthless conversations that could drag on for hours. We sit down and argue politics, Big Brother Naija and the just concluded champion’s league. Our fates are worsened when someone is willing to argue against our points.

The pleasure this brings, I have discovered is unquantifiable. However, it hardly yields any positive results. We just argue back and forth, get our voices cracked, and spit on each other while trying to raise our pitch to be heard. If it is a fight on social media, we type till our fingers hurt or our batteries run out.

I am not ruling out the need to get social every once in a while, but just enough is good enough. We must learn to time ourselves in these situations. According to John Maxwell, we either pay now and play later or play now and pay later. Forming friendships, bonds and growing our network is an intrinsic factor necessary for our growth and success both financially, psychologically and emotionally.

Resist that urge to sit with friends or acquaintances for hours and hours talking about who did this or that. After all, Jesus said in the Bible that we should allow the dead to bury their dead. Remember the time management quadrant, we must learn to spend less time on things that are not important nor urgent focusing more time on those that are important.

Conclusively, we must learn and master the art of being deliberate and strategic. Like every other principle, if we do not learn to drive the ship to success, the ship will drive us to failure. Moderation and control are essential to managing our emotions in order to ensure we manage our time properly.