Photo Credit: ‘Out of Time’ by WildRiver Review

Being half a century in age, I have given the subject of time management a lot of thought. I am endlessly fascinated, entertained, and humbled by it. As an entrepreneur, I have often speculated– “If only I could bottle time and market it, I would be richer than Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola put together!” I would be Deborah Nelson, the original time-bottler, a Bill Gates, Donald Trump, and Martha Stuart, all rolled into one. I would be the wealthiest person ever to walk the earth-even more wealthy than Solomon who was granted wisdom and wealth by God. But who can bottle time? It is a rebellious demon wretch. Nothing less than a life long quest could put that Genie into a bottle, and it would take none one less than God Himself to do it.

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Image courtesy of: Julia Kim Smith/Shamim Momin, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria

‘Tempus fugit – time flies. Life is short. I can’t believe another year’s gone by…’

People say all sorts of things about time, usually about how little of it they have. Many of us genuinely lead busy lives and do find it hard to fit everything in – work, family, hobbies, exercise. But leading a happy and fulfilled life and achieving all our goals does require the skill of handling our time well. Time is a resource and must be managed.

Keep a record of what you are doing with your time.

Keeping a proper record of what you’re doing is a really important first step in managing your time and hence being more productive. When I tried this for myself, it turned out that there were vast swathes of my time that weren’t being used productively at all. Although I always regarded myself as having no time and being far too busy to do any more than I was already doing, in fact there was plenty of time spent on pretty meaningless things such as watching TV, surfing the Internet (not in a productive way), or just lying around.

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Image Courtesy of Vintage Roadside’s @ Flickr

Did the word “free” in the title grab your attention?

We live in the internet age, where we’re growing more and more accustomed to getting things for free. Whether it’s information from blogs and online newspapers, services like email and Twitter, or images, videos and music tracks, it’s all free and it’s there for the taking.

The problem is, “free” could be costing you a lot more than you think.

“Free” Short-Circuits Your Brain

In his book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely discusses the power of “free” – and how it seems to short-circuit our logical thinking:

In one trial of one study we offered students a Lindt Truffle for 26 cents and a Hershey’s Kiss for 1 cent and observed the buying behavior: 40 percent went with the truffle and 40 percent with the Kiss. When we dropped the price of both chocolates by just 1 cent, we observed that suddenly 90 percent of participants opted for the free Kiss, even though the relative price between the two was the same. We concluded that FREE! is indeed a very powerful force.

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