Time Management: - 8 ways to think about time and improve your timekeeping to be a boss!
To solve BIG problems, aim for small WINS! - Your time is worth more than money, create discipline to move free, maintain your mental health & be a boss!
The concept of time is a social one. Why did I structure that sentence like this? LOL - I make me laugh sometimes, sounding like Yoda and that.
Let me start again…
1: Time is a social construct.
Time is a social construct, what this means is that time in itself ‘is what it is’, it is as powerful and/or worthless as how one sees, uses and values it. We as a collective - our institutions of cultures - create a ‘meaning’ of what time is. This means that time neither goes fast or slow, time goes to whatever speed we give it definition.
Examples: Ever been at school or work and you watch the clock ‘tick-tock, tick tock’ and mentally it feels like forever for the time you need to come? That end of work, to the idea of freedom? 5:30 pm! Yeah, I’m gone! Or, whenever you’re doing an activity or something fun and the time runs down so quickly, and you want it to stop, so you can continue to live in the moment? Yeah…
Time transcends ‘time’, time is only as real as your thoughts. Like money, time isn’t real, its value is created by the scarcity mindset of man.
We subconsciously put the time in 3 blocks, and for the majority, it is covered by the 9 to 5 - or whatever your work hours are - then everything revolves around this working structure.
Block 1: Pre-working hours - 6 am - 9 am:
Wake up
Breakfast
Get ready to work
Commute to work
Block 2: Working hours - 9 am - 5:30 pm:
Work
Lunch
Work
Break
Work
Block 3 : Post-working hours - 5:30 pm - 10 pm:
Commute back home from work
Free time / unwind from work
Get ready to sleep
Sleep
This is the average work week and whilst it is not bad it does leave you hardly anytime to get things in your work week done. You may feel like you’re rushing around, rushing around doing everything that needs to get done and you will zone out and become a stressed-out zombie ‘living’ for the weekend. What we don’t realise is that the 9 to 5 was created to keep us ‘stressed out’ and mentally on the run and funnily enough, we accept it because it’s a ‘content conditioning’ - we were born into it so we know no different, so we do what we see everyone else do without any questions.
Blame Henry Ford LOL - he is a genius - but here’s a quick one:
Industrialism created efficiency in product creation, split the workload into small precise parts, creating a greater output of product. Too much product needed to be sold, so this created consumerism that created advertising. In order to ‘sort’ humans into workers, middle management and leaders, they needed a validation system, and this created qualifications and education.
Education follows the same process as factory work, you get a stamp of quality, your school grade, at an expiration date - you graduate by age - and receive your N.I number at 15 then it’s off you go to work, you conditioned one. Crazy right?
2: You only have 24 hours in a day.
We have all heard the saying “we all have the same 24 hours in a day” and at a High level that statement is factual but, what we don’t have in a day is the same level of responsibility or resources to do and/or get things done.
For example, I am a solo parent - my son’s mother passed away - so that means the 24 hours I have in a day, is half that of a father in a dual-parenting household, what do I mean by this? My universe revolves around the needs of my child - like every parent, I hope. So, the tasks and responsibilities to meet his needs will always come first, even before my needs - this is my opinion, other parents can and will think different to me and I am ok with that…
If in order, to meet his needs, he needs 8 things/tasks done within a day, then I have to get these 8 tasks done, simple right? So from my 24 hours, I have 8 tasks, all with an assigned value of time - the effort of execution required to meet his needs for a set purpose. Let’s say for what he needs takes 4 hours in a day, that means based on my responsibilities and resources those 4 hours are automatically gone. I am not in the comparison game but for illustration purposes, I will compare this to a two-parent household. Now, if there were two parents with equally distributed effort on parenting responsibilities, then that 4 hours could be cut in half to 2 hours per parent, or if a family decision were made those hours could be traded to one person in sole, for another responsibility for another thing, get it?.. Of, course you do.
This is the single parent ‘handicap’ and/or anyone with set resource limits. Now, if I had the resources to get an Au Pair or nanny then ‘time’ is valued at what I paid for…
3: Time is valued more than money.
Time is worth more than money - well, I can’t speak for everyone - My son did have a nanny and whilst it ‘freed’ up time to get other tasks done, I ended up seeing it as a ‘double loss’, why? I paid someone else money to spend quality time with my son, time in his development that I could never get back and therefore, I lost out on his growth and the money that the other person received to then enjoy those moments with him… So, I made the decision to stop. I needed to find a new cost/benefit option that drives more value for me, to do what I needed to do and spend more time with my son… I needed to solve this problem.
4: Understanding your needs.
I tweeted once:
”Creating structure is one thing. Developing the ability to move with fluidity within & around that structure is another. The ocean has structure but its fluidity allows it to adapt effortlessly. Its persistence conquers the rigidness of the mountains, each and every time.”
And I also believe that time and patience are our greatest weapons. So how did I solve the solo-parent, timekeeping problem? Meet needs and still achieves milestones:? I broke the needs up:
Make an income
Son’s education
Spend quality time with son
Keep the household functioning
Exercise
Improve and protect my mental health
Personal Development / learn something
Have fun
5: Understanding the problem:
I realised that time wasn’t the problem, I took a deep breath and held myself accountable and said “time is not the problem here, I am!” And to be honest, it wasn’t as bad saying as I thought, try it.
Repeat after me - “Time is not the problem, I am!”, see? Not so hard was it.
I had to think about my time in a digestible way, to get what I needed to get done, as quick as, possible and as easily as I can, to a HIGH level. So this is what I did.
6: Analyse must-haves and blockers:
Firstly, I looked at how 24 hours in a day is structured, this is a social construct, there is a cultural rule of engagement that I must adhere to, I can not swim upstream on this one because it only hinders us - blockers & must-haves. I separate these in the following ways:
Blockers - Fixed Institutions rules:
Schooling hours
Business hours
Local offline processes.
Must-haves - Body functional needs:
Sleep
Eat
Rest
Must-haves 2.0 - Survival needs:
Stream of income
Maintenance
Up-skilling
And broke up the 24 hours in a day to meet the priority of one. I chose sleep as the most important priority because if one does not sleep, one will decrease productivity and everything else is impacted - there’s a caveat to this which I explored here lightly, on the topic of brain frequency states but I will go deeper on this on another day.
The minimum amount of sleep required to function properly within a 24 hour period is 4 hours.
4 / 24 hours = 6, so we have 6 x 4 hour slots. Take away 4 hours for minimum sleep so that leaves 20 hours to do what?
7: Split activities into digestible pieces & benchmark:
For me, I have defined what activities are required in a day for my son and me to keep on a healthy balance:
Meditate
Read
Shower/get ready
Exercise
Eat
Work / Creativity
Break - recharge
Sleep
The average amount of attention span the human brain can give to a particular task is between 45mins - 2 hours before requiring a 20-30mins break, over the course of 6 hours in total - according to
So now we have a target and set timeframe to complete any given task/activity with maximum optimisation. 20 hours / 8 core tasks = 2.5 hours. 2 hours 30 minutes. I set a schedule to complete any given task within 2 hours and earn a 30 minutes break or breaking the duration of these tasks up into smaller pieces clustered together…
How would this structure work in real terms?
8: Creating your structure to solve your problem.
This is my son’s and my schedule for the next 10 years, it’s a basic foundation that we can tweak to suit the demands of our day, week, month. I am aware there will be times that I will be away for work and/or we would be on some type of holiday and school with give out but as a basic structure, this is what we live on.
Wake up: 5:30 am - Meditation / Yoga
Reading: 6:30- 7 am - Son awake up
Get ready:7 am
School run: 8 am - Breakfast club
Gym: up to 90mins of training.
Eat & Prep mind for work: 30mins (if not intermittent fasting)
Work/Creativity: 10am
Lunch: 12pm - Break fast/ Breakfast
Work/Creativity: 1pm
Break/rest: 3 pm
School run/son’s training: 4/4:30 pm - Martial Art/Swimming/Rugby/ Tutoring
Eat + Free time/ Playtime/ Read until 7 pm.
Get you ready for bed: 7:30 pm - Bathtime
Son asleep by 8:30 pm (latest) - Prep your school stuff for the next day.
Eat & Prep mind for work: 30mins
Work/Creativity: 9 pm
Break/rest: 11pm
Get ready for bed: 11:30/12 pm - Bathtime
Read & Sleep: 1 am
Now, this might seem quite overwhelming or intense but, in fact, it is not. I get good pockets of rest, from the time I ‘win back’ when I get all the needs & tasks within that 2-hour time slot done and use up the allocated amount of breaks whenever needs be.
For example: in the morning after Yoga/Meditation, I will read the book I am fixed on. I jump on my mini pedal bike and cycle whilst I get my reading on. That 30mins out of my 90mins exercise done? I won that back, I can therefore take a cheeky 30mins nap if my body needs it. I listen.
What about if you can’t sleep? Sometimes, if I can’t sleep I’ll gym twice a day to exhaust my body, so I knock out. Or, if I am unable to win back time and I am I’m really exhausted when I put my son Pharaoh to sleep - 7:30/8 pm - I might knock out and wake back up about 11/12 pm… Then I have two choices to make, listen to my body more and try to sleep until 5:30 am or it’s back to work I go, until 2 am and try to sleep from then.
So how can we structure your day:
Break your day up in 6 blocks
Dedicate a block for sleeping
Understand what your blockers are and what are your must-haves
Write down your main activities needed for a great day
Split activities into digestible pieces
Loosely time how long it takes to complete activity
Structure your day
Try out your new structure and tweak it to suit you
And once you problem solve and take control of your 24 hours, we can find quicker and easier ways to ‘automate’ some of your weekly tasks to win back ever more of your time but i’ll save this for another blog!
You got this and thank you very much for reading!
If you like this post and thinking about trying out this structure please comment, and let me know how it goes!
Yours Truly,
Beckford
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completely disagree with 4 hours min sleep. It's 8 hours and 7 absolute min to not suffer any impairment.
A lot to take in here, Mr Beckford. But I was keen to finish the article, as I have struggled with time management. I’m a mother of 3 (in a two parent household) working 12 hour shifts which are sometimes overnight, so my idea of a great day differs, but I’ll definitely be incorporating some of these tips to try to find better balance. Insightful and well as inspiring.