Time and tide wait for no man – Geoffrey Chaucer

Time is a commodity that everyone possesses equally, the difference is in the spending of time. Everyone believes that they spend time on things that are a priority to them and they do not have time for other things. Twenty-Four hours is what we are blessed with but for other people these hours are not enough, depending on the side of the coin that you belong they may be enough. My curiosity is, why some people get more with the same amount of time than others. What is it that they are doing well and that we are doing wrong? Time Thieves are real. You could be a time thief or your friends and coffee sessions, even sleep has a potential to be one, if it is not one yet in your life.

Time thieves are those things that are given attention but they don’t deliver any good. They make you feel good for a moment yet the feeling soon parishes. They always look so appetizing to take you away from what you are doing and own you with pointless activities and you become very busy and look productive, looks are very deceiving, but you have nothing to show for it. You may even tell yourself that you were having a busy day but in essence, your day was busy with you and your body would feel it. This could happen throughout our lives – sleep, wake-up, eat and idle around. The time thieves have produced experts in looking busy and while they are working with us we don’t want disturbance. I have been one of the experts – with the look HEADPHONES, serious face, and Internet – that worked very well. One day. I read one quote that goes, “Do something today that your future self will thank you for.” That hit home, I think I needed to have an out of body experience to stop being a busy expert. And I knew I would take a lot to defeat that habit.

The questions that brought back to life are below, they helped me and I can assure you that they will also help you.

Time Thieves Recovering Questions

1. What are the benefits of what I am doing right now?

We like doing things and thinking that we are adding value. Until you do a retrospection on yourself, you will never know any benefits of waking up in the morning and conquer a day. Mind you, time thieves will give you all the answers but one thing for sure – your gut will never lie to you because your gut connects you to your conscience and your conscience is the core of what you are meant for and you know if this is meant for you or not. Think of benefits and make a decision, whether you want to leave a meaningful life or not, because where there are benefits there is added value.

2. What do I expect to achieve on this day?

Achievements would make your life worth living. The way you measure achievements may vary from one individual to the next. Some people prefer to achieve big things and things that can be noticed but when you are transitioning from being an “expert” you need to start as small you possibly can, the reason being that it is very easy to default and time thieves welcome you with wide open arms. So starting small will put you on a journey as the saying goes, a journey of a million miles starts will one small step towards the right direction. Start a list of daily achievements expect from yourself – this gives you the map of doing things the right way but it does not end there you also need to add the time for each item and the duration of the task. At the end of the day do a review – tick or scratch – this will give you a fulfilment and worthiness, and this is a step closer to acknowledgement because if you do things the best way you can – somebody is going to notice you and acknowledgement alone is an achievement. One thing that we take for granted is a celebration. My principle is the celebration of every achievement – this is the happiest moment in my life.

3. What do I need to do next?

The art of mastery is – repetition – repetition – repetition. That is as simple as it gets. There is something called a beginners luck, what it does to people is that you get to be a winner for the first time and when you do it the next time you may fail or other people think they know how to do it and they stop which is an element of time thieve personality – procrastination. Repetition, give you a chance start building a habit and new values for yourself – you challenge a status quo that you have set for yourself. Repetition makes you improve things that you have done. Of course, tasks will be different or same each and every day but that is of little importance because we are creating something big here – since Rome was not built in one day, you also won’t be fully changed by one task or in one day. Once you master the way you do things you can conquer any tasks that are given to you. In fact, you can even go back to the time thieves and look them straight in the eye and say – TRY ME! That is facing your fears with confidence and straight talk, if you do not do it for yourself no one else will.

It is true that time not used is time wasted and time wasted will never be given back. I challenge you to look at your life routine, study routine, daily routine, even sleeping routine and see how it benefits you right now. If it happens that there is a positive benefit keep doing what you are doing and push the envelope but if it is the opposite, you know what you need to do – read this article again and again and again. I can preach and tell people to do this or not do that, one confession that I can make is that I am on this journey myself and since I’ve started I only see positive things in my lifestyle.

I am positive to say that before I started my journey I was idling or lazy to be exact and through hard work and making myself a priority – things are changing for the better. The only fear I have now is the fear of succeeding and is what wakes me up in the morning and pushes me to take that step, make a change and keep going. So why wait, time is not waiting for you.

You owe your time, big time…

Written by Mduduzi Mthanti