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January 16, 2003
Prioritizing time
Are we doing justice to the roles life has assigned us? Altaf Noor Ali offers some insight
A colleague recently confronted a life-threatening ailment and he came out of it almost by miracle, to the relief of all his loved ones. Sharing his near-death experience, he said that there was a moment when he thought he was alive and the next when he thought he was gone. Between those moments was eternity — his whole life unfolded in front of him like a 70mm movie bringing the situations in life where he wished he had acted differently. He went cold realizing how right he thought his priorities were at that point of time and how meaningless and misplaced they appeared then, as he lay there helpless, while doctors struggled for his life. He regretted having missed doing so many things that he had thought about, but did not, when he had an opportunity.
Not many are lucky enough to get a second chance. Nature is fair in that all of us get 24 hours in a day — not a second more not a second less. Our life — as measured in terms of seconds, hours, days, weeks, months, and years — goes on like a vehicle whose fuel indicator is not working by default. Virtually, nobody will ever have the power to store time or to reverse it. Given these facts, what is the best time to do the most important thing in our life? It is now.
We need to make the most of our time. The basics of time management that everybody ‘knows’ is that before starting the day, prepare a list of tasks to do and go on ticking them as we go on achieving them. However, that is not the only thing to do. Like our money, we have the liberty to choose its use. However, like many investments and expenditures competing for our money, we can put our time to the many ‘options’ available to us. Are we ‘investing’ our time in the right way? We need to be careful in picking up our priorities as we race against time.
In essence, our life is a sum of small and big, right and wrong, priorities and actions. Think of priorities as ‘inputs’ and our actions as ‘output’. The quality of output depends on the quality of inputs. What goes in comes out. If we wish to change the output, we need to change the inputs. The inputs improve through the process of gaining knowledge, awareness and consciousness, which comes by constantly challenging if we are working towards the right priorities.
Our priorities need to be linked to the roles life assigns us. These roles may include being a parent, colleague, employee, citizen, friend, neighbour, relative, follower of a religion etc. and should be seen in that context. The duties may be as vague as being a human or as specific as it may get in a job description. However, this does not translate into meaning that roles with vague job descriptions are less important than the ones in iron cast. Are we doing justice to the roles life has assigned us?
The issue is that the right priorities may not happen to be the most pleasant ones. Why is it that we do not have time to go to a barber but have time to watch a cricket match? We have no time for a walk, for a prayer, for a physical check-up but somehow make time for countless other unproductive activities? We find it easy to chat with our friends for hours but find it difficult to give time to our love ones. Such preferences take a toll and eventually make some priorities take an exit route without even our noticing it, until a situation so demands, and then we are left with regrets. Choosing the right priorities and getting about doing it in the correct manner is a matter of self-discipline as well.
How about saving ourselves from doing things that would otherwise go in doing ‘less than right things’?
Given the theory of life being a vehicle with a dysfunctional fuel indicator, each one of us is doing the best we can do with our time at any point in time. True?
Now look around and observe what most people are doing with their time. It appears that time treats them with the same contempt they treat it.
Would it be any better if there were a way available to compute the ‘return on time’? Numbers have a way of giving us some kind of direction. If we invest a thousand and get back a hundred after a year, the ‘return on investment’ is 10 percent, no matter what the currency is. Similarly, numbers allow us to compare options. Obviously, if we have an option of investing something at 10 per cent and the other at 20 per cent, we will be going for the latter option.
One wishes we could develop some science that would allow us to compute return on our ‘unpaid’ time as well. That will probably make us value our time the way it deserves. Until that happens, let’s try to get down by our actions to the Divine reasoning behind why we can compute a return on our investments and not on time.
We are fortunate if we can learn from people around us who do things well. We are even more fortunate if we know people who do the right thing. And we will be extremely lucky to emulate those people who do the right things in the right manner at the right time.
The welcome thing about my colleague, who got a second chance, is that the experience transformed him into a much better professional and a more humane person.
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