“At least three times every day take a moment and ask yourself what is really important. Have the wisdom and the courage to build your life around your answer.”
Lee Jampolsky
“So much to do, so little time”, many among the common phrases used to express just how little time we have in a busy and progressive world. Strictly speaking, Time management unnoticed to these who advocate anyone and everyone to be time cautious is that at its core, time management is really self-management or an important aspect of self-mastery.
Managing one’s self means organizing your life in accordance with a purpose or meaning that reflects your own unique individuality. Only in this way can you be said to truly control your own self. Ask yourself what constitutes your ultimate worth and significance of your being and begin to see that time is everything and of the essence.
Without a reason to keep time, you won’t plan what to do with it. Without a sense of responsibility for the time you have alive, which is obviously minimum - one may not be living but, in truth be unknowingly breathing to death.
Making firm choices about how to give shape to your life is necessary to live as an individual, but being a self still requires more and this means being time cautious, because the meaning you give your life must be unique to you as an individual and be within your sphere of existence, your time space.
To succeed at being a self means being noble, which means being time oriented or having a deep sense of time management.
“Now consider the law of supply and demand to see how much those moments of life are worth to you. When you treat death as an event that’s far off and distant from you, you’re clearly reasoning that that you have a decent amount of supply (of life) lying around.”
“You’re convinced that even if you’re going to die, it won’t be today or tomorrow or even next week. You see supply as high, so the value of life winds up being low. That’s why the important stuff gets put off. You think you have plenty of time to get back to. You live frivolously.” This in itself isn’t a call to perfection but, a realisation that in the long run each moment does matter.
“If the supply-and-demand theory of life is accurate, the answer is no. The supply of life would go up, infinitely. But if that’s right, the value of life drops infinitely as well! As a consequence, immortality doesn’t sound particularly attractive.”
“Sure, you’d have an infinite amount of time to experience things. But you wouldn’t value the moments. You’d forever put things off. Why not? You could always do the important stuff later. The immortal would live with no zest. No passion. Not for us, thanks! We’ll choose death!” Gregory Gale
It is easy to be swayed by recognizing exterior values or meanings, so to avoid being pushed to and fro, you give yourself a self-created purpose as you use your time and make decisions, make your goals fluid and possible to be achieved as they need to be.
Hence the idea of “I have no time” is just in truth poor time management but, ultimately means poor life management or poor self-mastery.
True self-mastery as with time management means deciding what you want to get out of life, what you want to achieve, committing to it and setting forth a road map to do so.
Heidegger has a way of thinking about your existence as temporal, If being authentic means thinking about your future as aiming toward your eventual death, “What should I do now?” is a question that necessarily requires your conscious involvement in the answer and the act of realization of making your actions to come to life.
To Heidegger, knowing that your time is finite, you no longer wait but drive forward in an active sense, resolute to forge courageously toward not only your death but by living as an individual in light of the projects you commit to.
Although your future possibilities are fixed in the inauthentic future, in the authentic future they’re open, and you take an active role in determining what they are and this means knowing how to plan your time. Pay attention to the way you’re existing right now.
Are you just in the moment? Or are you always looking ahead into the future, trying to see where to go next? You’re always reaching ahead of yourself into the next moment. Hence thinking that your past, present and future are distant or individual is a great and common misconception.
Not having a good perception of your time is disowning a large and essential part of yourself. Think about time existentially seems very different; time is central to your way of existing, one in which moments in the past, present, and future are related to one another in the way you experience life as meaningful. Existing for you means living across time.
Being a time keeper means being yourself, your way of existing must strive to live in your past and future specific to you as a self, just as much as your present acts.
Only in living this way can you hope to succeed in pulling together your whole self and can you really enjoy life in colour, despite time and the human life being very finite as Horace put it: “we are but dust and shadows”.
“Character is the result of two things: mental attitude and the way we spend our time. “
Elbert Hubbard
