To me, time is the most valuable resource anyone has. It's the one major equalizer for me because everyone no matter how rich or poor, how old or young, etc has the same 24 hours in a day. So, I have used a bunch of mindsets, tools, and techniques to spend my time the most effectively. Here they are.
Opportunity cost
This is the concept of off which the entire topic of time mangement hinges. Opportunity cost is 'cost of the next best alternative', this is especially high for time because in the same one hour you could send out emails, finish an assignment, plan the next 10 years of your life, assemble a bomb, watch Netflix or literally a 1000 other things.
My optimizing your opportunity cost, you effectively use your time.
Time bank
Every single day at the stroke of 12, you get 1440 minutes again and again until you die. I think about time like money. If I had $1440 with me everyday, I would make a plan to spend it, I do the same with time— just in a different way.
You can take this another way too. This way of thinking that you have a replenishing bank can be freeing. If you completely wasted your time today, you'll have the same time again when you wake up tomorrow and so on.
Planning to spend it all 🤑
Continuing with the bank analogy, you can think of someone ruining a meeting or interrupting on you as stealing a bit of time. This way, a calendar is the security of your bank. When you map out how you're going to spend your 1440 minutes you're defending yourself against theft of that 1440.
A calendar is also the visual plan to spend and budget your time. Planning for the day in advance allows you to considering your opportunity cost for that time because once it's gone, it's gone. When you're okay with the way you're going to spend your time, you've optimised the opportunity cost and effectively managed you time.
Automate & leverage
This is the secret sauce to getting more done in my opinion. Automating and leveraging your time allows you 'invest' your time and get more than 1440 minutes. This could mean spending a little time setting up Zapier to do repetitive things or recruiting so you access a part of someone else's 1440 minutes too!
Saving
The last part of the analogy is 'saving' your time, there are tons of tools and techniques that help you save time. I'll just cover a few that help me:
google calendar: There are tons of calendar apps out there but I find that google Calendar does the job well enough and integrates well with Google meet and Gmail, both of which we use at Pinglr. It helps me 'budget' my time as described above.
Notion: instead of having to switch back and forth between mutliple apps, notion integrates personal and professional docs and other in one place. It's also great at collaboration of docs which improves everyone's productivity at Pinglr.
Rescue time: this is a tool that tracks where you spend your time on mobile and desktop then shows analytics based off the tracked time. It helped me uncover where, in what category, my time really goes!
Tide: it is a chrome extension with the pomodoro technique integrated with white noise soundtracks. This is more about the technique than the tool!
Hope you found this helpful :)
-Samay
