Summarized Version
In Malaysia, many events and activities on a daily basis make us waste our time instead of allowing us to spend our time in the meaningful way, or the way that we want. Despite that, many events that waste our time are unavoidable such as traffic jam, queue, and waiting for many things.
Rather than complaining how much time are being wasted due to uncontrollable circumstances, it's best to consider how to save and utilize time out of the busy schedule and squeeze time from those unavoidable situations. Here's are some tips that help you to know how to utilize more precious time for yourself.
-
Reduce activities that don't create value which also refer to things that you do but you know it's differ from making your life any better. You have a dream, but not everything you do in a day contribute to achieving your dream. This include all your hobbies that you do for pleasure and enjoyment. Learn to control the time you spent on those activities and set the priority to do so AFTER you done with your important tasks.
-
Identify what's truly important in your life, and why. Because we are forgetful. And we sometimes stuck in the situation where we forgotten our passion in starting something at first. This is why we need to keep track on why we start something and always remember what we trying to achieve in the end. When you know the important value in everything you currently doing, you won't need to spend time rethink about it later or risk giving up in the middle of doing it.
-
Learn to make quick decision because hesitation in decision making is often wasting unnecessary time, as you are going to achieve one final decision anyway. The moment you go into deep thoughts to consider massive amount of choices, your time going down to drain and those time can be used for your beneficial activities, so you are indirectly wasting your precious time in hesitations.
-
Utilize your time in non-working environment. As mentioned earlier, there are lots of circumstances that you are stuck on a daily basis that waste your time a lot, and you can't control or avoid sometimes. Such situations include: waiting for your food in restaurant, waiting for someone, in the public train or bus, in the queue, and in the traffic jam. You can always take out your notebook to read or write something for your planning and working stuff, instead of doing nothing and wait for the situation to take away all your time.
-
Setup tasks schedule. We probably have a schedule in our mind, but it's not that useful if you don't write it down as clear as possible and follow according to the schedule. Following a well planned schedule ensure that you keep on with your tasks and ensure you have a proper direction, so you don't need to think what you suppose to do at certain time.
Full Details
In Malaysia, there are three main thing that usually happen in a daily basis that kill our time: Travel, Queue, Waiting time after ordering food. Best of all, we usually can't control or relief the situation no matter how much we complain about it or trying to make a difference (provided that you really did), because these three will go on and on for uncertain amount of years, and continue flushing all our precious time down into drain.
If you are a person value for your own time, thinking that you can use tons of your time to do something meaningful, or wanted to make more time for yourself, you probably found that lots of events and activity in Malaysia can waste your time a lot. Which include walking from one place to another which usually takes 5 minutes, but end up taking 10 minutes plus because there are lots of people blocking your way, or there are 'incident' appear along the way that can't make your journey go as well as you expecting it to be. This is because there are too much of things going around that, without intention to, but would kill lots of your time.
Rather than focusing on things that we could not change, it's wiser to consider how to squeeze more time and utilize every single minutes or even seconds to be used into activities that produce good value in your life.
All of us are granted with 24 hours each day. Let's assume that we spent average of 8 hours for sleep, another 8 on our usual routine for study or work, 8 hours remains to do things that we are conscious about and what's really make us feel like we are living. The bad news, we usually spent the 8 precious and valuable hours for others, for waiting, and for nothing. What truly left is 1 or 2 hours to do things that we really wanted to. Just a word of advice, it's definitely regrettable living to spend only an hour or two every day to do something that you like.
This guide is created after I had gone through lots of struggle trying to understand how my time is being spent and wasted, and why I always felt like I had gone through an entire day of more than 16 hours but couldn't recall what I had actually achieve. Of course, I can come out with a summarize list of what I had done from the moment I woke up until the moment before I'm going to sleep. But what had I lived through the day that make my life meaningful?
I believe many people had the same question in mind. And this guide is created on the purpose for people to realize that even in Malaysia, we can live through the day feeling more concious on what we want to do and how we spend each moment or hour, and crave any meaningful activities or experience you had.
1. Reduce Activities that Don't Create Value
Sounds simple but this could be really hard. There's probably activities in your mind that you want to get rid of, but there are also lots of activities that you are used to it and like it really much but at the same time, you should understand really well that it doesn't make your life better other than pleasure and entertaining.
The list include scrolling on your Facebook page, watching your favorite Hong Kong/Korea/Japan drama or movie, playing games (ouch...), and the list goes on with all the activities that you enjoy but you know it's not making your life any better, or such activities has nothing to do with achieving what you want.
Try to summarize up your day before you sleep and see where most of your time are spent on a daily basis. Note down as much activity as you could, then you will know where most of your time are being spent. The next step is to consider how much time you suppose to spent on your routine or usual activities. It could be difficult and not getting used to it when you try to change. You probably spend a little more time as planned at first because you are not used to it. But do remember that following the plan with perseverance and good determination is the key.
Another important thing to bear in mind, reduce your favorite activities doesn't mean you need to eliminate them out from your life. Just that you need to remember that the activities that you enjoy suppose to come
after you had done with your important tasks and work. So it should not be something that you set as priority in the morning or middle of the day.
2. Identify What's Truly Important in Your Life, and Why
All of us have idea of what's important in our life, what we want to do or what we want to have in our life. But if you sometimes wondering what you should do at a certain moment or situation, then you are probably not having a clear and determine thoughts of what you truly want.
When you have a clear idea about what's important in your life, you won't risk spending your time thinking why you want this, or what's so great about it. It's important not only to avoid spending extra time on hesitation, it also keep you motivated and keep going on.
The risk of not having a clear idea of what's truly important in your life is sometimes, you keep on thinking why do you want to continue doing something. Let's take example of writing a story. Your expected end result should be completing the entire story and attracting numbers of readers who can feedback on your story. But the process of writing the story can be long and not as enjoyable as what you thought.
You might have a few chapters that you really enjoy writing because that's where your great idea are. But you still need to write numerous chapters that connect these big idea into one final story. When you are stuck in writing the chapters that not in your enjoyable moment, it's easy to get bored and you might ask what's the point of creating all these while there are more enjoyable things to do? That's when you start wasting time in hesitation, and the greater impact is that you might think that completing the entire story is not so desirable.
Identifying the important things in your life not only require you to think and think and that's it. You need to write it down because we human are naturally forgetful. We don't remember every single thing that we thought of even though it's really important. This is why you should write it down in a notebook or diary for all the important thoughts you had. And note down as soon as you can before you risk forgetting them.
Create the notes at somewhere that you can easily reach so that you will able to read back what you wrote even if you forgotten about it later. I used to write notes and idea of what I want to do or something that make me feel interesting in Words and save it in one of my desktop folder. When I clear my desktop folders and files, I'm able to read back what I had wrote and what I had planned to do. In that way, I can regain my forgotten thoughts and remind myself again on all these things that I wanted to achieve.
3. Make Quick Decision
Everywhere is full of choices. When you need to decide where and what to eat, which clothes to buy, which road to pick, what to do now or later.... This is something that everyone will face on a daily basis. You might not notice it, the amount of time you spent in hesitation and indecisive can be summed up to a great amount of time that extend the spending time in a single activity, and add up into the total amount of time you wasted in a day.
For example, you walk out from your place, you wonder if you should take your lunch at cafe A, or cafe B today. After some brain war to compare between cafe A and B. You finally decided on cafe A, so you walk to the direction where cafe A is. When you reach cafe A, you think about what seat you should take. Should it be near the door, or inside? After a short while, you chosen your seats, so the waiter bring you the menu. Then you look through the menu, and consider if you want to take rice, noodle, or other option. If you choose rice, which rice you should take... and if you choose noodle, what noodle is best... and finally, you decided to order the particular food. When you done with your meal, there is no waiter around, so you probably consider if you should keep waiting until someone is around so you can call the bill, or go to the cashier counter to look for someone....
The above scenario is something really common and could happen to anyone. If you consider the whole process, from the time when you consider which cafe to go, which seat to take, which meal to take, how to make your payment.... all these small activities and behavior are full of hesitations and indecisive. Each of them might take few seconds or minutes, but when you add them up, your hesitation time might double up the amount of time you out to take your lunch until you back to your own place.
In order to learn to make quick decision, you may take some time to search on Google to find article about quick decision making. This article,
"5 Tips for Lightning-Fast Decision Making" by Ericson Ay Mires pretty summed up all the great tips to make quick and smart decisions so that you won't need to spend your time in hesitation which in the end, you can save the necessary time into doing something that create better value.
4. Utilize Your Time in Non-Working Environment
Now this is my favorite part and it's the most practical method. Above list are thoughts and idea that is appropriate for your mind. But having great wisdom itself won't make you a highly knowledgeable person. In the end of the day, you need to know how to practice the knowledge and wisdom.
Bear this in mind: Every single seconds you spent on doing nothing that related to making your life better is wasting your time. now, you need to identify the moment when you are not in the situation of working on your desire tasks and the way you can perform to do something beneficial and meaningful instead of wasting the precious time, like the situations below:
-
Waiting for your food in the restaurant. There is no absolute answer on how long your food going to reach your table. Even if the serving time is fast, you can spend the few minutes to do some reading or writing that is related for your stuff. Best thing in this situation is, you have a table. So utilize this great and comfortable opportunity.
-
Waiting for someone. The worst case could be standing & waiting for someone beside the road or under the hot sun. You don't have any chair or table so it's not gonna be comfortable. In this case, you can utilize your brain to perform some planning and thinking that is related to your stuff. If you used to bring a small bag, keep a notebook with you (conventional notebook made from papers, because it don't consume battery and you don't have to risk doing other things) and write down your thoughts. Just avoid being too focus and always becareful with your surrounding.
-
In public train or bus. Let's skip the moment when it's too crowded and you can't do anything but standing and beware of your belongings. During the non-peak hour when you get the chances to sit down or stay away from the crowd, that's the time when you can utilize your mind to do some reading, thinking or planning again. Better than just looking around and waiting to reach your destination.
-
In the queue. This might not be a good time to do something thinking or planning because you need to beware when people trying to cut queue (too common in Malaysia) or try not to miss your turn if you have a queue number. High focus thinking or planning can make you miss your number, so better not. It's still good to do some reading or writing to spend time.
-
In the traffic jam. I'm not encouraging you to lose your focus while driving on the road. Stuck in the traffic jam is something that you wish, but can't really help to change anything. You can't do any reading, thinking or planning because you need to focus driving on the road. You can still listen to some educational channel or CD, which means you need to prepare it before you get on the road. But if your music player is spoiled, too bad then.
5. Setup Tasks Schedule
Another practical method to make sure that you are working on your desire stuff. To do this, you will have to make some planning to know what you want to do, and how you want to practice in your life to make things come true.
When you successfully come out with a list of to-do stuff, you need to fill them into your life and execute your plan.
Here's an example of how I setup my schedule with my to-do tasks in a week:
| Monday |
Research & Writing Blog |
| Tuesday |
Research & Documentation |
| Wednesday |
Study list of food that benefit body system |
| Thursday |
Practice dancing |
| Friday |
Read Novel |
When I have a fixed schedule, I print out and stick the paper on my room table so that I know what I'm suppose to do today. Better than hesitating what I feel like doing now or which task I should go for. You can have your own version of time schedule in any way you like. And it's best if you can list down as detail as possible so that you can just follow according to the plan. You can perform the same tasks continuously for few days before you start another task.
Always remember that the key is to have a proper plan before you create the time schedule and follow the plan accordingly. Do not attempt to skip it as you like, and do not risk forgetting your task schedule as time goes by.
