How to Become the Owner of Your Time: Jedi Tricks

Article translated from Oliver Emberton blog abetterlife.quora.com
Article Translation abetterlife.quora.com/How-to-master-your-time-1

The secret of time management is simple: Jedi tricks

Imagine you are a Jedi Master named Roman. The love of your life - Princess Tatyana is enclosed in a burning building and you would like to hurry very much to save her.



You can think of Tatyana as the embodiment of your dream, your inspiration - let this be the most important thing in your life.



Unfortunately, on the way to Tatyana, attack aircraft take you mercilessly. Whole armies run over and slam from blasters right for you. The stream of enemy rays requires attention - before you have time to dodge - you are a corpse. Imagine the attack of the attack aircraft as an urgent routine and a constant distraction preventing you from reaching the princess.



Everyone knows how a lyrical hero copes with this dilemma. As soon as he forgets in the abyss of petty battles about his main goal - all his efforts will be in vain and will not be worth a penny. He can gracefully chop a whole army of stormtroopers into small cabbage, but their number is unlimited and if you pay most of the attention only to annoying stormtroopers, this will only distract from the main target. If the delay is too long, the princess in the burning castle will simply bend.
The same analogy can be traced in our lives. There are important strategic matters and urgent tactical matters.



The secret to mastering your time is this:

Focus systematically on important matters and suppress routine urgent matters.

For some reason, people are initially set up to focus on matters that require an immediate reaction, for example, phone calls,
and are set to postpone important matters for later, for example, going to the gym for training.
This setting must be changed just in the opposite order, despite the fact that this is contrary to the initial settings of your brain and most brains of human society.
See what it takes your time, what do you spend your days on?
I give a guarantee, most of the time is spent not on what you yourself choose, but on what is requested of you. Here's how to fix this problem:

Say no.

Most of us follow an unwritten social contract: when someone asks you to do something, you almost always say yes. It may look very noble, but do not forget - there is still a princess suffering terrible disasters, which urgently needs to be saved, otherwise she will bend, and you just agreed to slow yourself down in your path, just because you were asked very politely. Sometimes you can sacrifice some social comfort to save a life (that is, the success of your main business). As a bonus, people instinctively respect those who can directly say no based on their motives.

Throw away the TV.

Comments are redundant.

Get rid of alerts.

Modern technical innovations are making full use of our vulnerability to matters requiring immediate reaction: email, Facebook, Twitter, Quora and many others will fight for the quanta of your time and constantly distract you. Fortunately, this is easy to fix: turn off all alerts. Decide for yourself to check all these things only when you have time to get distracted, say, at the lunch break, and work through all the alerts together and at a time so that you don’t have to return to them anymore, this will give you a bonus in the form of time saved.

Follow the priorities.

People are such strange creatures. If you have agreed with your friends about a meeting, you will arrange everything to see them at the appointed time. But if you have something that matters to you more than everyone else, for example, you write a book or go to training, you won’t begin to rebuild other things for this. You just do it in one of your time windows. Treat your high-priority matters as if you should be on time for the flight of the plane: set a clear time in advance for this and discard everything that will interfere with your flight.

The main things go first.

What is the most important (and not the most urgent) area of ​​work you could work on right now? Take steps in this direction today. Remember, there will always be an infinite number of distracting stormtroopers - do not be fooled by excuses like: "Now I can handle this little thing, and then I can create my imperishable." “Then” may never come in the routine of over-urgent, and sometimes openly stupid occupations. This kind of excuse only slows or leads you astray

Less work, more time to approach.

There are always millions of things to do. The admission is to choose no more than 3 tasks per day and steadily strive to achieve the assigned tasks. This restriction will not please your brain. Other people will not like this either. Follow this line anyway. Man's focus on one task per unit of time is much more effective than multitasking. Multitasking in this case means dispersion of forces. Focusing gives time to do the job efficiently.

Ignore it.

It is rude, unprofessional and often absolutely necessary. Yes, there will be people whom you will not have time to answer. Yes, there will be requests that you allow yourself not to fulfill. You can take your time urgently to do the cleaning, pay the bills or process the mail. If you do not do such urgent small things right now, the world will not fall apart. In compensation, you will achieve what really matters to your life.

Another lesson from the Jedi, in the end: they are heroes.

The heroes inspire us for many reasons:
- they make tough decisions,
- they stubbornly continue to follow the chosen path,
- they achieve important tasks.

But there is another reason why we love our heroes so much. We know that in each of us lives the power to become the same model for others.