Tag: Time

When are you due for another dentist visit? Do you dread the day till it’s over? If you do, I feel for you.

In my case, I was almost 6 months overdue for the next dental check-up. I let it slip my mind for a long time. But hey I had good excuses. I led a busy life. I didn’t have time blah blah blah.

One morning out of blue, I decided it’s time to get off my back side and act, so I called my dentist.

It took less than two minutes to make the appointment and as soon as it was booked, the anxious feeling went away.

What’s easier, the day I had it done, it wasn’t as painful as I’d anticipated. In fact, the whole experience was so relaxing that I almost dozed off on the dental chair!

Now looking back, I’ve come up with two questions.

Question One: Why did I put it off for months and months?

Not surprisingly, my procrastination was largely to do with fears:

• Fear of the unknown
• Fear of what if’s
• Fear of all the ridiculous, unfounded worst scenarios playing in my head.

The next question: What prompted me to make that phone call at last? The quick answer is: Pressure.

I was not self-motivated enough till the pressure started to mount. Where did the pressure come from? The deadline! As they say, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

This experience has left me wondering if there’re any useful tools that can help reduce the likelihood of inaction or even better increase the chances of action.

In the process, I’ve found one technique to be effective:

• Breaking down large things into small things and small increments.

As the year draws to a close, most of us will probably think of making new year’s resolutions. The intention is good but sometimes our yearly goals can be too big, too overwhelming and too scary. The challenge for me has always been how to make them stick.

Knowing what I’m like, what I’m good at and not good at, I’ll be trialing something new this time, I call it my new day’s resolutions as opposed to new year’s resolutions. It means taking small steps towards small goals in relatively shorter time frames. It’s about creating many small wins. After all, a small win is still a win…

Have no time to write? Me too. Somehow, I doubled/tripled my output in July.

We all strive to have it all, live a rich, meaningful life, but in the process, certain obligations can take hold and become high priorities, as such we usually end up putting our dreams aside, leaving ourselves with no time to do those things that are equally fulfilling and rewarding. Funnily enough, we even consider them as a guilty pleasure.

When can time be finally on our side?

Lots of us have a full-time work commitment and/or a family commitment or a study commitment. Everyone is time-poor these days, who’s got a whole big block of time that can be set aside for writing or anything else?

Perhaps it’s a question of over commitment or maybe a lack of time management in our ability? But all I know for sure is if at the end of day, I haven’t done at least one thing I enjoy doing, it’d mean that day has been wasted. Of course, it may sound a bit exaggeration. After all, from a physics’ point of view, energy is created and transformed (but not “wasted”) to somewhere. It’s true even when we’re stationary. The challenge is where do we put energy to good use to, so it’ll serve us?

For me, it’s writing.

Having written 9 posts in a month is my new record. From the very beginning, I didn’t set out to achieve anything, nor did I have a number in mind, I just wanted to write as often as possible, whenever and wherever I could. Then just let the results speak for themselves.

So there I was in July. I wrote when I was standing, I wrote when I was sitting, while on the bus, during my lunch break, after work hours, at home between house chores. Even at times when I didn’t have a smart phone with me (like when I was in the bathroom), I still stayed relatively active in writing in my head. Word by word, paragraph by paragraph, little did I know, a post was then born out of a blank page. It was a great feeling.

Much has been said about work life balance. For me, it’s all about compromising and sacrificing. To inject writing into my already busy schedules requires a bit learning – how to make the most of my free time. Got only 5 or 10 minutes in between? Not a problem! It’s a matter of setting up smaller blocks of time here and there, then allocating writing to each time slot as you go along – So useful and practical, it’s set a good precedent for my writing ritual to continue this way going forward.

Enough said. Just crunch the numbers!

Amazingly, on any given day, on average I’ll have spare 2 to 3 hours to do just that – something I wouldn’t have thought possible. It’s quite astonishing to watch how little things can add up quickly to become a giant if done consistently and systematically, which has led me to think that if I could do it with writing, what else on the horizon can I also achieve?

Watch this blank space…

When it comes to prioritizing, do you do what’s urgent or what’s important or whatever is in front of you? Do you spend your time firefighting rather than making any progress? What are the time wasters in your life that get in the way?

Time management. Some experts have argued that there’s no such a thing. I get that. Time constantly flows by and never stands still, it really can not be captured by any humankind in any given moment. Looking at its own unique character and a particular role it plays in our lives, time has been and will always be the most irresistible and irreplaceable resource in the planet. No matter where we come from or what our status is, everyone gets a fair share. Fair enough! But think about it, no one has time forever. How do we see the value of time? In my case, a reality check was what I needed to go back to basics and re-examine my time-poor lifestyle. Here’s the story.

My recent wake up to reality was like a slap in the face moment. Where it happened was quite interesting. A veterinary clinic! Early this year I took my dog to a vet for an annual vaccination and a routine health check-up. While we were in a surgical room waiting for the vet, I thought I’d kill a few minutes reading some pet care information on the walls. Immediately, a poster containing a dog year chart caught my attention. Out of curiosity, I went over to check which age group my dog would belong to. And? In human years, my dog was around 65, categorized as an old dog near the tip of the chart. Standing there, my heart started to sink. It was an awakening moment I needed. In retrospect, often I got so caught up in day-to-day things, petty stuff in life, that many more important things ended up slipping out of my mind. So, right there and then, I came to the realization that it could only be a few more years left for my dog’s time on Earth. It sucked. Big time! Of course it was hard to take, but when I took a step back and thought it through again, it really opened me up and served a big purpose for me to live by – seize the day before it’s too late. Imagine, every time a person wastes one day of his life, that one day is the equivalent of a week in a dog’s life. Reality bites. You bet!

To draw a close to this post, an old saying comes straight to my mind: Time and tide wait for no man. But it feels like something is missing. So I think I’ll extend it to: time and tide wait for no man and no dog…