Managing Your Hours is Managing Your Life!

Princess Obi



Procrastination they say is the thief of time, but how do we end up managing the time. It is just 24 hours, what do we achieve with that?

'Using a simple illustration' "An instructor in a seminar brought out a wide mouthed jar and set it on the desk, producing a dozen fist sized rocks and carefully placed, one at a time into the jar. When the jar was filled to the top and no more rocks would fit inside, he asked the group, 'is the jar full?' Everyone said, 'yes'. Then he pulled out a bucket of gravel and dumped some gravel inside and shook the jar, this caused pieces of gravel to work themselves down into the spaces between the big rocks, he asked again but this time the group answered, 'probably not'. He brought out a bucket of sand and dumped some quantity, the sand filled the spaces left between the rock and gravel, he asked again and everyone screamed, ' No'. Once again he grabbed a pitcher of water and pours it in until the jar was filled to the brim". I began to ask myself, ' what was the point of the instructor?' So many thoughts came across my mind but all totally different from that of the instructor who said if you do not put the big rocks in first, you will never get them in at all. This indeed is truly how to manage 'Your just 24 hours'.

State what your priorities are and how much time you will spend on them, decide your rock, gravel and sand. What really differentiates us is the size of each rock which varies depending on who we are. Change the rock, gravel and sand into hours, minutes and seconds; the rocks are those things which take up a whole lot of space or hours and the gravels more than a few minutes while the sands are the few seconds in which decisions are made where a simple Yes or No can change a whole ball game.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “If we take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves”. Good time management is taking care of the things that matters most to us first and keeping that jar of rocks in sight all the time.



Follow me on @adayaeze

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of OLATUNJISPEAKS.com.

Follow us on Twitter: @OLATUNJISPEAKS | www.facebook.com/OLATUNJISPEAKS