On time management

Recently, I happened to come across a lecture on "TIME MANAGEMENT". Time, which is equally distributed to all human beings, is an important factor which needs to be well-managed. We all have an invisible relationship with time, whether we are aware of it or not is a different story. Our uneven ways of spending our 24 h time mainly include time for doing useful/responsible work (usually our studies or job), time to have a reconnect with family/friends/society and do accomplish our personal goals of whatever nature and finally our switch off time aka sleeping time. A perfect balance between all three of these is absolutely necessary to have a quality life and we deserve it. Here are my instantaneous thoughts/experiences:

1. Digital well-being : In fact, for last one year I am researching as a part of my personal goals on how do distractions work, digital well-being and experimenting with clean sleeping habits (I am prone to polyphasic sleep, interrupted sleep and lots of vivid dreams which looks like it comes with a well written script) and I could find many correlations with the quality of time we spend on each time zones.
I use an Android phone and in its settings there's one thing called "Digital well-being and parental control" which once you open shows a pie diagram of how much time you spend on your phone on that particular day with a detailed time record of using each app. Also you can set timer for your activities and all that (I didn't go for that timer stuff). Perhaps many of you know this already. I found it quite retrospective as I was lacking a realization of how many hours I spend using my phone. I didn't feel good about it ; so I set a goal in such a way that I will gradually bring down this over time with a daily decrease of few minutes. This helped me to scrutinize what should I watch , whether it's of value or not, how long does that take and so on, instead of randomly grazing over every X and Y that comes to me. I can surely say this worked for me and found impactful on all the three aspects of time management. I should also not forget to mention that my nature of work doesn't have much to do with phone except some emails and slack nudges; so, that might be one reason that have worked well for my responsible work part. 

2. Cultural differences in time management:  I'm not sure how much that is relevant to us being Malayalis , but I have seen when working with people at various countries, that people have their own indigenous culture having another pattern of time management and work standards. For example, my South Korean colleagues work extremely far longer than regular working hours up to 12 AM or so on a daily basis. They manage their sleep during way back to home in train etc. and next day they'll appear sharp at 8 in the morning. I have observed that staying longer time in office is not many times due to massive work load or just to meet a deadline , but it's just like that it's a cultural aspect and we may on other hand interpret that as an ineffective time management. Chinese also have a similar pattern while colleagues from Europe work sharp 8 hours and leave on time. This also brings in a conflict between hard work and smart work. I think cultural influences are also part of Responsible work hours. Suppose if we have got a job in South Korea with a giant like Samsung , we will have to fit with cultural standards of their working which may find very exhaustive in a long run and that means our responsible hours may invade both our reconnect and rejuvenation hours.

3. Need of knowing own momentum and time management : A familiar example I can think about is our childhood comparison of one studying for long time and scoring less marks in an exam and the other being spending short time and scoring high marks (I am talking about about an ideal case where there are no manipulations) . For the one who spends or require more time to understand a concept MUST spend enough time to get the fruit. What if one day he/she decides to follow the other one and spends less time  to have an equivalent time frame of study.? This is a kind of case where knowing own momentum is important and manage timings accordingly (Thanks to my CUSAT MSc. room mate for instilling this point in me) .

Picture courtesy: Pixabay