Understanding the Essence of Life

Since the beginning of life on the planet, human beings are obsessed by securing and refilling their essential resources .. Securing money, food, companionship and space are still the major carrots that all human beings run after, one way or another; however, is that what life is all about?

One of the biggest mistakes we all do, is that we neglect life’s core resource, and that is “Time”. Time is actually the only currency that we trade during our life .. we trade time for money (during work), time for fun (entertainment), time for compassion (relationship / friendship ..) and so on .. Time is the universal currency that everyone earns as long as they are alive, and everyone pays every single day ..

So do we secure our time as much as we secure other resources? Do we deal with it similar to how we deal with our bank accounts? We all have monthly bank statements that we refer to, but who does a monthly time statement? Do you know how much time have you lost / earned last month? When was the last time you ran a “Time” audit, similar to running financial audit?

In Merrill and Covey’s book “First Things First” (1994), they described the time matrix as follows:

As much as the above time matrix is easy to use, straight forward and has been widely tried, a lot of people couldn’t classify their daily tasks and fall into the emotional trap of justifying time wasters as a necessity to relief stress and perform important tasks. For that reason, one of the easier “Time Audit” ways is to keep it as a simple 0-1 binary equation. Let’s look at it from an “Accelerators – Decelerators” perspective.

In order to properly perform “Time Audit”, we need to have proper calendars /  diaries that we log our activities in daily, by hour. That should include sleeping time, social time, sports time ..etc, don’t neglect anything…

Sit at night daily, or weekly and have two colored markers in your hand then review .. what have you done that is considered an accelerator to your life’s journey .. your mission in life and what you want to achieve, then mark it with green. Look at everything else, and consider that anything that is not pushing you forward (accelerating you) is actually pulling you backwards, or simply extra weight / time spent that can be used to accelerate you further… Is that fair? Is this doable? Shall we be that strict with our time?

If we look at the real essence of life, people are running after growth in everything, forgetting that with every clock tick, their time bank account is decreasing, and what complicates the equation more is that no one has any clue to what their time bank account is worth .. so we don’t know when we will run time-bankrupt .. So if time was the absolute currency and we have no access to our own time bank accounts, don’t you think we need to be extremely careful about it?

Don’t waste a second of your life not moving forward, or preparing to move forward .. Leave negative people behind you .. leave negative feelings behind you .. think forward, focus, audit your time and persevere .. the bank is ticking  … tick tock