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4 Simple Ways You Can Do Immediately To Protect Your Time

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You can use these 4 simple but effective methods immediately to protect your time from today. As Jim Rohn said:

“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” — Jim Rohn

But many of us make the mistake when we value money higher than time!

The typical example that many people fall into is the guilty feeling when they spend too much money on material things and later on feel regret about buying.

But they don’t have this kind of guilty feeling when they wasted many hours on the couch watching TV or having parties with friends.

This was also the feeling I have many times before when I studied at University.

At that time, I felt the money is more important than time. And spending a few hundred dollars for a new jacket makes me feel (happy for a while then) guilty rather than spending 5–6 hours checking my social media accounts daily.

I don’t have the feeling of wasting my time because I think that I have plenty of time in life. But the reality is each of us just has the same 24 hours in a day.

And absolutely nobody know how long we can live.

In the middle of the pandemic, when millions of people are stuck at home, the rate of wasting time on useless things even becomes higher.

Because we don’t need to rush for public transport to the office, come early for the meeting…And we can work next to our own lovely bed that often seduces us to take a short break to enjoy the comfort of working from home.

This causes a big problem for us when controlling the time. 

As Benjamin Franklin described for the first time in his essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman” (1748).

Time is gold!

It means that time is precious and the more time you waste, the more gold you lost! It is still right nowadays.

Because in the same 24 hours a day, why someone can earn a lot of money while others are struggling with their financial life?

This is all about how you control your precious 24 hours a day.

If you want to become someone like Elon Musk, Warren Buffet,…, you need to learn to use the time like the way they do, not the way how a couch potato uses his time.

So how to stop wasting your time and make it works for you more effectively?

Each person will have a different way to approach and find ways to make their time work better for them.

And for me, by analyzing and learning hundred of hours about this topic. These are the 4 biggest lessons that I wish I know about it earlier to optimize and protect my time.

1. To protect your time by delegation

The delegation will make you become more successful and happier, not perfectionism.

The belief that

“Only you can do the tasks perfectly and nobody can do it as good as you”

is a wrong belief that will kill your success and make you run out all of your time invaluably.

But this is a belief that I have had for years.

Because I thought that an A+ grade student like me will always create a better result than a C grade student when doing a task.

Then I choose to do most of the things by myself instead of asking my teammates who have lower scores in class to give me a hand.

But later on, when I read the What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management from Professor. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, this reading is totally changed my thoughts.

And I recognized that I was wrong. As you try to chase all the goals at the same time, it will ruin your time rather than create a positive impact on your life.

Being a perfectionist and self-made everything doesn’t equal effectiveness. Instead, this makes a person be easier to burn out and waste a lot of precious time.

And follow Prof. Jeffrey Pfeffer,

Delegation is a skill.

And your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn’t go to hell if you take a day off.

It means that learning to delegate effectively will make you be a great leader and create a massive outcome, not trying to do everything by yourself to make your work more effective.

Because when you delegate your tasks, instead of using your own 8 hours/day. Now, if you have 1 person to support you, it means that you get 16 hours instead of 8 hours.

And if you have 10 people working for you, you can get 80 hours done your job in just one day.

This is the power of delegation.

But many people fall into the trap of “perfectionism and self-made”.

It means that they just trust themselves and believe that they can do all the tasks with the best outcomes by themselves, and no one else can make a better outcome than them.

Let be honest together, I did it for years as well.

And I totally understand this feeling.

In the beginning, it helps you to be more flexible and can come up with the final decision quickly.

But when you have more tasks to do, you start to feel overwhelmed and face the dilemma

1. If you try to complete all the number of tasks, you need to reduce the quality of each task you did. So you can have enough time to complete tasks on the deadline.

2. If you still keep working on tasks with the same quality, you will late for the deadline because there are so many tasks that come up at the same time.

As Warren Buffet says,

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Therefore, if you don’t want to face this dilemma, still having the tasks be completed with high quality while increasing the quantity, you need to delegate your job to others effectively.

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