Introduction

Most people nowadays often feel that they want to achieve more within their weekly schedules, but there is simply not enough time available. How come we see famous business people in media being so productive in reaching their goals and dreams, while we are stuck in our non-productive nine-to-five work routine just to get by? There must be something we can implement and gain that extra energy to boost our productivity.

The goal of this essay is to teach the reader Daksh Jindal’s simple and practical time management strategy to help to build everyday habits, that use our limited energy capacity in the most effective and healthy way. The essay also teaches the reader Laura Vanderkam’s tips on how to prioritize and make long-term goals for the current and upcoming years.

Time management strategy

Lately, I’ve been diving deep into several inspiring podcasts to give me extra motivation to find new perspectives and discover new ideas and opportunities. I was cleaning last weekend late at night and I figured to just google the words “time management podcast” and found a podcast called “The Mindset Show with Daksh Jindal”. The podcast’s goal is to teach and develop the listener’s mindset and habits for the better. The show will help by giving practical life-changing tips to weekly implement in our lives. I found this to be really interesting, so I dived more into the topic.

In episode 8, Daksh opens up the topic of time management by introducing a time management strategy he has built by reading books and watching interviews with high-performing CEOs such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Ferris who are running multi-billion dollar companies with their 24 hour work routines. Their schedules are full, but they often don’t burn out. In this episode, Daksh shares the three main ingredients that make the 5% stand out from the remaining 95% of people. Daksh has not previously used this strategy in his life, but by learning and activating it he has gained more from his weekly routine. He was able to achieve his dream of starting his own youtube channel and podcast plus gained more free time to read books. One of the main things he learned was to focus his energy to progress his work and personal life goals further, thus leading to development and satisfaction after each day.

Priorities

The first key ingredient of this time management strategy is learning to use the power of prioritization. Have you noticed that we often use our energy and time on the most irrelevant things every day? According to Daksh, when we go to the shopping mall to buy a t-shirt, our brain isn’t telling us to try every single t-shirt in the mall. We already know what generally works for us, so we try on a maximum of 5 to 6 t-shirts and choose one of those to buy. It is amazing sorting power that our brain has, but we often don’t trust and use that power as an advance toward the real challenges and the most important things in our personal and working life. We use it for the most unnecessary things such as choosing a show to watch on Netflix and deciding what to wear today. This is where 5% of people stand out from the rest of 95% of normal popularity. They use their prioritization towards exact, clear daily goals to achieve. For example, notoriously Marks Suzerberg doesn’t spend time choosing what to wear every morning. He has the same kind of jeans and T-shirt in his wardrobe to wear every day. While 95% of people are worried about how to look good and what to wear today, he is saving his energy for more important decisions and actions.

Now, let me explain where to use this prioritization power and how to use our limited daily energy toward the things that have a positive, measurable effect. Daksh shared in his podcast a tip for writing daily goals every morning. First, have some kind of notebook or notepad near your bed and when you wake up write on the page your top priorities for this exact day with a fresh mindset. Start by writing three top priorities for your working hours. At this moment the brain goes through everything that you need to do today in your professional life and it helps you to pick up the three most important priorities to work towards today. Have in mind what are the necessary things you need to do to feel satisfied at the end of the day.

After you have set your daily professional priorities, write down the three most important priorities for your personal life. For example, what you want to learn in your free time and what kind of steps you need to take to achieve your biggest dreams. When thinking a little further we can use the 20/20 principle. This principle means doing 20% of the long-term goal today will progress you the same amount further to achieve the end result. For me right now this means slowly writing this essay step by step to have the end result of having it well done. This can also be reading books, learning to play the guitar or anything that has positive long-term effects in the future.

95% of the people don’t have clear goals and don’t know how to make steps to achieve the goals. Mainly they get used to their daily lifestyle and live their life on autopilot. This lack of prioritization is the biggest reason why most people stay in a mediocre lifestyle and aren’t using their potential to the fullest. By having career and personal life goals, we as humans have a bigger purpose and a clear plan in daily paces. And at the end of the day, we feel more complete and fulfilled about the progress we have made during our day. In this episode, Daksh shared that he has met many workers that have worked for eight to nine hours every day at their office without them feeling fulfilled at the end of the day. They have worked on many different things without them not having the energy or time left to finish their top priorities. For them everything is important. They never took a short amount of time to write down the top priorities for the day, but just work towards everything at the same time. End of the day, they feel unfulfilled and unsatisfied after many hours spent working. Don’t do the same mistake and simply write down three top priorities every morning for your personal and professional life.

Gaining control of the free time and setting long-term goals

To help understand and develop the previous idea of prioritizing even further, let’s go through Laura Vanderkam’s tips on saving time and setting long-term priorities to implement and work on our weekly routine. Laura is the author of several time management and productivity books. She is a host of the podcast “Before Breakfast” and her work has appeared in publications such as “New York Times” and “Wall Street Journal”. I personally found her as she shared her knowledge of time management in a TedTalk episode named “How to gain control of your free time”. For this episode, she interviewed extremely busy women and studied their weekly routines.

According to Laura, we don’t make the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want and time saves itself. Most people spend too much time watching tv or to some other non-productive activity when they should use a piece of that time for hobbies or something more useful. Usually, people like to answer that they are busy and can’t make more time for something else when asked. By studying extremely busy people Laura learned that most people can make more time since time is actually highly elastic.

As Daksh mentioned, prioritization plays a huge role in time management. Laura sees prioritization from a different point of view of having long-term goals to achieve within our calendar year. In this case, we can use Laura’s knowledge and tips to add steps to our long-term goals into our personal schedules.

Saying and hearing the sentence “I don’t have time” often means it’s not a priority. The basic way of finding your priorities is to look backward, but she thinks is way more effective to look forward. To start prioritizing, Laura suggests starting by writing a personal next year review. What three to five things would make next year a great year for you professionally? Write them down. After that write your own family holiday letter. What three to five things would make next year a great year for you personally? Now you have six to ten goals for next year. The next step is to take steps toward those goals. These main goals are your priorities, everything else is extra. These are the goals that would make you fulfilled and satisfied to work on and reach them. Now put them in the categories of career, relationships, and self-development. This step reminds us that there should be something in every category. The final step is to plan steps to work on them during upcoming weeks and add them to your schedule. Laura reminds people that, there are 168 hours in a week. If you working for a full-time job taking 40 hours per week and sleeping 56 hours a week, that leaves 72 hours for other things to prioritize. We have plenty of time to use to make progress toward our goals and future if we avoid spending too much time on not important things and making excuses. Laura suggests first trying her method for a short time period and testing out where your personal goals fit the best in your calendar. Don’t be afraid to make changes after a while to make your calendar even more effective.

Boundaries

Now we know how to prioritize, have priorities in categories, and have learned that most people have plenty of time to spend on developing these important aspects in their lives. In Daksh’s time management strategy, the second key ingredient is setting clear boundaries. Now you have specified your top three working and personal time priorities for today, it is time to plan how much time can be given to each task and find the motivation to take the first starting step. One great example of a priority for students is reading a book. Reading a book is a time-consuming activity that requires a lot of time. If you write down reading as your top priority, your brain will react to it as a difficult task without any set boundaries. Without boundaries, most people don’t reach their priorities or even make the first step toward them. On the other hand, what most students suffer from is procrastination. They set goals like studying English and studying math for two hours. These boundaries are time-consuming and unrealistic. It’s very unlikely that the person has practiced studying for two hours straight or done a similar energy-consuming task before. Daksh compares this type of huge task to being equal to going to the gym for the first time and instantly trying to lift the biggest weight. It’s really challenging so the person feels frustrated and gives up. The key is to set simple and easy-to-access steps. For example, reading fifteen minutes or five pages every Monday and Wednesday. This simple and easy-to-start boundary of pages and time sends the signal to the brain that the task is easy to do. Start with small boundaries to develop self-confidence, consistency, and enjoyment. Those fifteen minutes or five pages will be more effective and satisfying than wasting the remaining forty-five minutes of an hour not having energy and feeling unsatisfied. Daksh suggests starting with small goals like using 15 minutes for the task and increasing those boundaries by five minutes every week to teach yourself to have the energy and motivation to work on the subject longer. End of the month you will easily be reading thirty to forty minutes each time.

When setting boundaries it is also important to give an equal amount of time to work on strengths and weaknesses. Let’s use student life as an example once again. A student has set his/her today’s priority to study English and math. He/she really enjoys one and dislikes another subject. Priorities without boundaries in this situation can lead to a scenario where the student gets excited and uses all her/his energy and time on the favorite subject (the strength), thus not having anything to give for the harder subject (the weakness). If a student would have set boundaries to study a harder subject for fifteen minutes and moved on to the favorite subject for another fifteen minutes she/he would have the energy to achieve progress evenly on both subjects. In life, it is important to develop both your strengths and weaknesses. Boundaries help you to stay away from uncounted bias towards doing your favorite things more and more.

Distraction-free environment plays a huge role in boundary setting. The last step of setting great boundaries is to make sure that the working time is dedicated only to the task. Find a comfortable place to sit and make the environment as distraction-free as possible. This means no phones or other attention-taking objects around. First, try to practice focusing for a short amount of time. As previously mentioned fifteen minutes is a great start. The first few times the attention can go all over the place, but don’t feel guilty about it. It is quite normal. It’s about practicing focusing and being there to do the task. One tool to keep bringing attention back is doing short medication between.

It is important to respect boundaries. If the person does not respect their own boundaries, no one will. The final step of setting boundaries is to make sure people around you respect your boundaries and give their best to create a distraction-free environment for you to work on your very important priorities. When you say to someone that you are working, make sure you are actually working. If they catch you saying something and doing the opposite, that will send a signal to their brain that you are not being serious about your boundaries. Next time they will not take into consideration those boundaries and simply keep interrupting you even more or give you something else to work on. This same situation happens with friends and colleagues as well. They try to convince you to do something fun with them for just a moment and you end up hanging out with them for hours without progressing on your priority like you previously wanted to do. Everyone is out there to take your time from you if you don’t value your own time. Time is the most valuable resource. Respect your time and use that time to achieve your goals by setting clear boundaries.

Hobbies

In Daksh’s time management strategy, the third key ingredient is energizing hobbies. According to Daksh, everyone should have hobbies. Without hobbies, some people treat their work as hobbies and push themselves to become workaholics. Being addicted to work is not healthy, since workaholics often forget to focus on their physical and psychological health. There are people who work only for the money and that money is everything to them. Working for money will never give deeper meaning to the progress of work. There has to be a deeper psychological meaning behind it. Similarly, there are people that force themselves to work a huge amount of hours far too often. They put themselves under highly unhealthy pressure and to escape that pressure they spend their free time-consuming pleasures like watching Netflix, playing video games, and drinking with friends.

Hobbies are an important part of the daily routine as they act as a spiral cord of the person’s day. Healthy hobbies are activities that recharge the person. In the podcast, Daksh describes his hobbies as reading and listening to podcasts while he takes his daily walk outside. He reads in the morning, afternoon, and night. He listens to podcasts twice a day since it is his passion work as well. These hobbies can be anything that helps the person to relax, recharge and maintain their daily energy levels. According to what Daksh has read Elon Musk’s recharging activities are spending time with his kids and reading. For Muhammad Gandhi, those were walking in the garden and reading as well.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, focusing is all about practice. It is also all about understanding how much focus and attention everything needs. it is quite much physical and psychological energy that the person consumes during that working time, thus the person needs to learn to sustain those energy levels to complete those six priorities every day. Daksh recommends everyone stay away from screens since they have proven to drain away people’s energy and make them unproductive for a long time period. He also mentions in the podcast that It is scientifically proven that our visual perspective takes 30% of our energy and especially watching something like Youtube or Netflix video it is common that after finishing a long video people feel tired. People spend their free time-consuming things and their energy, not achieving anything or resting.

Great hobbies are something that requires productivity, psychical and psychological effort, and bring joy to the person. A few good examples are playing an instrument, drawing, painting, walking outside, or something sporty such as going to a gym. Or just being around family and doing something fun with them. Having a hobby that makes a person happy and energizes is one of the ingredients that 95% of people are missing from their lives. Most people work super hard and spend their time-consuming media on their screens and doing activities such as drinking, that they consider resting. They are in fact doing the opposite. When people don’t rest well they don’t have energy or time left for meaningful aspects of their lives such as spending time with their family, starting a new hobby, learning new skills, and achieving their goals and dreams. If everything is about making money and spending money to consume, it has no deeper meaning and it is quite spiritually draining. A better option would be step-by-step learning to play an instrument or reading a book. After a couple of weeks, the person now has finished that book and learned a new perspective on the topic or now knows how to play their favorite song with their guitar. This type of challenging hobby gives joy as well as a proud feeling to the person. The person will gain extra energy from this achievement to use towards priorities and other activities. The key is to find hobbies that bring joy, recharge and give long time results that make people feel proud of themselves. Do them two times per day.

Sources

Vanderkam, L. 2016. How to gain control of your free time. https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_vanderkam_how_to_gain_control_of_your_free_time?amp%3Butm_medium=referral&amp%3Butm_source=tedcomshare

Jindal, D. 2022. My Time Management STRATEGY to get things done. Requires access right. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6ZzoKmWTJ9aKPZTW3orYMk?go=1&sp_cid=5e60ce2bc5b4bd04709fd1ae4f1c1f26&utm_source=embed_player_p&utm_medium=desktop&nd=1