Hello, colleagues! Good Evening! I hope you’re doing good and spending life at your best. So, how are your weekends going? Healthy, productive or just into bed all day long? To be very honest with you, I faced a lot of time management issues few months back because I have been managing my time very pathetically and it was like eat-sleep-office-repeat and then I worked on my time and found the thing that induced me to quit habits that I was doing irrelevantly and without any purpose. And this is what I want to share with you today. Time is a precious resource and unless time cannot be managed, nothing can be managed.
Too many people believe that career is determined by the 8 hours of hard work and effort we put into the office and our future and career progression depends on the boss and the company. But the reality is a bit harsh, you are on your own. Let’s discuss another matter! You finish your work at 6pm and go to bed at 12am midnight, how do you spend these six hours. Let me guess, watching TV/movies, playing sports, gaming, or just into bed? What if I say, the activities you do within these six hours are the most crucial and important beyond your imagination. “Cultivation” is forever dependent upon yourself, if you find yourself not progressing in life, you cannot blame and put the responsibility on your company for not grooming you. Solely, you are the one who is responsible and accountable for your life!
1. What you do after office is important
Clearly, we need to have work life balance. If you have a family, you have to spend time with them. Even if you are single, you also need a reasonable allocation of time to go to gym, to meet with friends, or be alone to meditate and so on. Of course, watching movies, playing games are good. But there are things you do not need to do. For example, watching new Netflix season, 10 hours per week (average time watching TV season), the time spent on playing the game Candy Crush, or spending time stalking your friends on Facebook, it does not seem to be good or productive.
So what should you do? And how can you be more productive?
Let’s start with “why” factor. Why you need to play candy crush or stalk someone on FB, for sure you don’t know. I know most of us do many activities which are totally irrelevant and play zero role in our life so ask these questions before you move on and decide to spend your time. Mind you! Time is money!
· Does it add any value to your skills?
· Does it increase your productivity?
· Does it help you ease your life or make it more complex?
· Is doing that activity necessary to spend hours of your life into it?
· Does it contribute towards your life goals or life’s mission statement?
· Does it help you achieve your definition of success?
If answer to any of 3 to 4 questions is NO, then seriously, you need to re-think before doing that again. How can you stay productive and make the most out of it by staying productive is what I will write in my next article. Don’t miss it out!
Reading can give you a good head start, this is often what your peers cannot obtain. Compared to others, you are more likely to know other industries strategies and tactics, and that may be helpful to you. You can transfer your knowledge within the organization or within your social network, create new possibilities for yourself, and learn about what and how’s happening in the world. Moreover, your conversation will become more interesting and will encircle around the things you’re reading. Anthony Robbins said, “If you spend one hour a day to learn about a topic, a year later, in this regard, the knowledge you gain will be more than 99.999% of the world’s people.” Even if you have 30 minutes every night, each week you can easily read a book. You may not be an expert, but I promise, you’ll know more than what your peers know.
I would suggest you to google advantages of reading and know yourself.
You can apply the knowledge learnt to real work scenarios, this is only an ideal state. If your company did not give you this opportunity, create opportunities for yourself. Working with a team, you’ll understand how things work in the practical application of the industry, and how it ultimately affect actual customers. You’ll learn how to perform the task and meet deadlines and get feedback on what you are doing and benefit from it. When you are not strong enough, these experience may not have any value to you. But you are still a novice and these experiences are far more valuable than the pay you are getting if you can really convince others to spend on your product.
You can do some volunteer projects. Start doing some DIY projects, you can even make a product out of it. Like currently, as we all know Independence Day (14th August) is coming, I am working to place my stall in Blue Area and you will see me standing there offering badges, flags, face-painting and all the other patriotic attractive stuff you see around these days. Do come and say Hello to me there!
So take the first step towards your volunteer project and try something new out of the office. But do not let these private jobs affect your work.
4. Actively build your connections
In your career path, a strong network of connections will make everything accelerate. If you have not set up your own personal connections, you’ll need to divide a portion of your time to do this.
A strong network of relationships, can enable you:
- contact smart friends, and learn their opinions
- get information and knowledge that are difficult to obtain
- income generating opportunities
- help you see the world from different perspectives
- help you identify your strengths, weaknesses & opportunities
Go get to know your work colleague or boss. If you are an entrepreneur, your network connections will be your early customers, your staffs will be your source of capital so rather than going home you should find some inner circles. There are many small groups which are highly relevant to your career. You should try to integrate into these circles. Every week, you can drink coffee together with new friends, or having breakfast or lunch with new buddies will definitely help you expand your circle.
You can also look into everyone’s career developments on LinkedIn and establish a network with mentors in those professional industries. Who knows they will be your next employers? Your connections will be your most powerful asset in the workplace. Since you have time to watch “Game of Thrones”, you have time to build a social network.
Let me suggest you a very useful yet very amazing social app, a lot of you may already know about it. An app named CouchSurfing. It can help you make friends from different parts of the world in different countries. If you plan to visit any country, you can ask for some local host there and stay with him or you can be the guest of any foreigner in your country. Would you believe, I have been able to make 132 international friends from 54 different countries with the help of this app.
Your life change starts tonight
6 pm to 12 am, you go home, though physically and mentally tired but you are free to do anything. During this time, you can switch off like switching off your computer at your workplace and do something that aspires you, make you smarter, stronger, and have a wider network of people and stop doing those ridiculous things that play no part in your career progression.
From tonight, take an hour a day to do these things just for yourself! Company pays you monthly for 8 hours of daily work, what do you pay yourself for 6 free hours? You want to get paid higher from your employer, in return, how higher can you go to pay yourself in spare time? Decide yourself!
