To manage time is to try to manage a huge river you’re swimming in. It not only doesn’t work, it’s conceptually impossible. Time management is a sneaky way to say Life management. And Life management is hard, unnatural, exhausting, impossible to fully achieve, creates expectations and decreases happiness. Things just happen when you give up control. When you stop managing your life.
It’s your responsibility to understand time. It’s a purely intuitive skill that is not taught anywhere. It’s about feeling the flow of time. Only among entrepreneurs and freelancers I have ever found people with developed time intuition. Time understanding helps you feel how your life develops in time. Life will feel like a continuum. You will feel when something is too fast, too slow or too repetitive. It’s like a whole new level of consciousness that keeps you time-healthy and time-effective. Based on this feeling you can work and grow fast while being patient about the things in life you cannot really force.
Intuition is built from experience. You need data points. You can play two simple mental games – think what the time is and then check the real time and think how much time has passed since a memorable event. Time Understanding will offer you effectivity, self-love and creative adaptability, will make you better at work and happier in life.
It’s of paramount importance to ask others “The Time Question“ until you have the intuition developed. What do you do all day? Give me a minute by minute breakdown of your typical day. Ask The Time Question everywhere. Use it to ask people about their work, students about their study and parents about their parenting. It’s the most educational question you can ask someone along with “how do you feel about it”. These are the two questions that bring life detail and nuance. While “how do you feel” is the central Game of Self question, “what you do in your day” is the central Game of Life question.
Priceless time always has complete priority, then comes a mess of time/money and your other values. Try to simplify and remember that current money is a hard necessity, future money is easy, but one day the future money will be the current money of today and you want to be in a better place then than your current one. And the way is to aim high and thus leave only the best low-risk-high-reward options to get there. Focus on money or meaning or both if strong. When something no longer feels a worthy time investment, quit immediately. Learn to say “no” and don’t dwell in the past.
