THE LIFE-CHANGING EFFECT OF TIME MANAGEMENT

All my life I have always love to talk to people -friends, colleagues in the office, my staff members, and my younger ones about the importance of time management and how critical it is to success. I have organized seminars on many occasions in my church especially for the youths on the same subject matters many times, to the point that when any matter that borders on time management arises, both in my office and my church, the next point of call is me. When I started dating my wife, the nickname She gave me then was ‘Mr. best time’ because I often told Her ‘the best time is now ‘when it comes to pursuing any agenda. Little did I know that all these while, all I have been doing was to talk about time but I never understood the science and practicality of it until our brush up week, when we took a course in time management. This x-rayed my life and I brought into focus the volume of time in months if not years I have technically wasted in the past.

Undertaking the course ‘time management’ opened my eyes and helped me to now understand it’s practicality. From the class , I understood that time is to be invested. Bishop David Oyedepo once said ‘time is precious, it is an aspect of a quality, those who are smart at its embezzlement make the most of life’. Dr. Nnamdi Azikwe of blessed memory also said ‘give me back my youth and I will pay any price for it’. These are men who had invested time.

I got to know that to maximize time, I must understand it’s nature. Time is indispensable, time is perishable you cant save it, time is consumable, time is irreplaceable. The one that got me most was ‘time is consumable’. This broke me down and I quickly reflected on many instances I have consumed time rather than investing it.

Time management requires self-discipline.  I felt this!  discipline requires that you approach any task as demanded and not as convenient and this would demands that you structure your life. Practically, an undisciplined person would always be a time waster, and this has happened to me before. I then became conscious of approaching every task as demanded and not as convenient. This also has effect on punctuality, the surest way to be late is to think there is time and it is better to be 3 hours early than one minute late.

Time management matrix: This was a game changer in my life, I have never heard that before. This reveals that all our daily engagements are divided into 4 – urgent and important, urgent but not important, not urgent but important and not urgent not important. To be efficient without pressure every task must be treated as not urgent but important, this means proactiveness. When you are always having urgent and important tasks, you become pressured, and this clearly indicate poor management of time. Any task that is urgent but not important is distraction, therefore, be cautious. While not important not urgent tasks are time wasters. These represent 100 units of time.

The status quo remains for every individual until attention is paid to efficient management of time.

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