Take control of your Time

Day 4: 97 Days to go

Time. As we become more mature we realize that this is the most valuable resource we have received from God. We can’t really ‘save time’ as if we could place it in a Piggy Bank and use it again later. No – we simply need to take control of our time, every second, every minute, every hour. But if we do this we will be rewarded in ways we’ve never imagined before…

Probably similar to most children, I grew up with a sense that time was endless. It was a waterfall that would drop from the top of a mountain and disappear into the river beyond, never stopping for a moment, just simply splashing down in a huge, generous stream. Living on a farm where life was very much in sync with nature, the seasons contributed to this sense of time being something that would carry on forever.

My parents worked with time, but in completely different ways: my mother always finding another creative or charitable activity to squeeze into her day, my father choosing to generously lavish his time on other people. Once I started school, my own time was punctuated by the bell ringing in the small, rural boarding school where I spent the greater part of my childhood. This was and remains to date one of the most idyllic places to grow up: situated on a farm in the lush, green area of northern KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. All the children of the German-speaking farming community in that particular part of the country were dropped off by their parents after church on Sundays and collected again by a parent lift-club five days later. In between, the days were marked by the ringing of a hand-held bell. The first bell meant rolling out of a warm bed onto a cold floor and saying your morning prayers. The next one meant getting up, making your bed, brushing your teeth and washing your face and getting dressed. The third one meant running barefoot over the sharp, crystal gravel to the Religious Education classroom, where the Pastor was waiting to hear if you had done your homework and learnt the necessary Bible verses and hymns off by heart. The fourth one meant running to the dining hall for breakfast. And so the bright sound of the bell trained us to act on the rhythm of time, until the final bell at night. This meant ‘lights out’ and was the signal for all eight little girls in my dormitory to forgive one another and ask one another for forgiveness for the day’s sins and hurting and fall into a deep and very peaceful sleep.

Very rarely, our joyful games playing tennis or ‘catch’ or making clay figurines from the silky smooth red earth after it had rained, our day suddenly would be disrupted by the deep, sonorous sound of the church bell. This always meant that the time had come for some elderly man or woman to stop living on earth and enter into eternal life to join God in Heaven. But even then, except for awakening a sense of awed sadness in my heart, without really understanding it, I did not associate that sound with the importance of my own time here on earth.

When I was twelve I had an experience through which I suddenly saw the intrinsic value of time and how it would suddenly sweep past and have a huge impact on my life. In the year before I had been ill with an acute kidney infection, which the doctor had ascribed to going fishing barefoot too often (which I, in fact, had never done!). I’d recovered well, but was now again complaining of pain in my lower abdomen. My mom was worried that it might be a recurrence of the kidney infection and off to the doctor we went. This time his diagnosis was different. When he failed to detect anything wrong with me, he concluded that this pain was probably the beginning of my first menstrual period: of my changing from a child to a woman. In the flash of an instant I understood what this meant: it meant that the end of my idyllic childhood was about to come… It meant that that I would have to be all grown-up and responsible and that my mother and father would grow old and die… Everything would change! For my young mind that was simply too horrible to contemplate.

When my mother and I reached the car, I burst into tears. I couldn’t express in words the incredible, deep sense of loss that I was feeling, and she was trying to calm me down without success. I think I cried all the way home to the farm and then crept into bed and cried for another couple of hours.

The menstruation never started, until I was 18 and my mother took me to the doctor because she was worried that again there was something wrong with me. By then, I was emotionally ready for the physical change in my body, but I also knew instinctively that this was not a health issue. When I had cried and cried that day, six years before, I had instructed my sub-conscious mind to resist the impact of ‘time’: I had demanded of it to extend my childhood for as long as I chose.

I’m telling this very personal story for two reasons: I want you to understand that while time keeps on running, we do have the ability to exercise control over both the actual time we have been given, by using it wisely, as well as train our subconscious to help us in achieving our goals.
Sadly, in my case, I only interpreted this lesson in a positive way many, many years later. When I was 18 I simply I felt exhilarated by the fact that I, not time, could decide what would happen to my body and when. And in a sense I think that is also what caused my hugely careless attitude towards time during the years that followed.

When I first left the protected and regimented environment of boarding school life and moved to university and the ‘freedom’ of choosing what to do with my own time, I came face-to-face with the challenge of never having understood how to exercise self-discipline with regard to time. Without the bell ringing, I thought I had the ultimate power. But in reality I was lost. I found it extremely difficult to plan my own day and stick to the time I had allocated to specific activities. In fact, I found it a terrible drag, since my creative mind simply got carried away with whatever I was busy with at that point in time. ….

Interestingly enough, many years later I learnt about the African philosophy of the ‘Seven Spirits’ that live inside each one of us human beings. For the first time I had a visual image that I could understand easily to explain my lack of time management. According to ancient African tradition, one of the ‘Seven Spirits’ is the ‘Wandering Spirit’ – the spirit that possesses anyone who is carried away in an obsession of one type or another. Our challenge as human beings is to manage these spirits (or call it attitudes) that dwell inside us. I needed to manage the’Wandering Spirit’ inside me…

But during my time as a student I certainly did not consciously understand the meaning of ‘managing’ anything, really! I was in a paradise of new knowledge and experience and on a quest to follow with wild abandon any new thing that I found interesting at that stage. Needless to say, this lack of focus resulted in me going through four different courses of study in six years, at the end of which I – to the great relief of my parents – had finally managed to complete a first degree.

Later, when I became a young entrepreneur and also during the time that I worked in other organizations, I never really bothered about the importance of keeping time, since I simply went overboard and worked longer hours and harder than anyone else around me, thereby earning the acclaim of my clients or superiors and with that the dubious ‘right’ to always be a little late. In fact, at one point in my career, in my early thirties, when I was heading a division within the Office of the Auditor-General of South Africa, and was 15 minutes late for a meeting once again, I responded very cheekily to my grey-suited auditor-colleagues who were grumbling about this: “I may be late, but once I’m here I add more value than all of you combined!”

I now cringe when I think about this arrogance. Fortunately, the guys were very good-natured and just laughed…

Getting to grips with time became an insurmountable challenge during the past couple of years, when I tried to combine serving a highly demanding consulting client with rescuing a drowning, rural non-profit organization, growing an own book publishing business and – to top it all – doing all this from two different places that were based four hours of driving apart! I ended up feeling like a ping-pong ball, which was banged around at the will of the different parties I was serving: clients, international donors and crisis issues at the non-profit, and employees in the publishing business. As long as I had the cashflow from my consulting business, I could somehow keep this mad pace going. But when suddenly this rug was pulled out from under my feet, the whole house of cards came crashing down…

During the months of introspection that followed, I heard the bells of my childhood ringing in my mind: I simply HAD TO take charge of my own time! I could no longer allow my time to be at the beck and call of everyone else, or otherwise I would never achieve the goals I had set for myself. But this time round, I was the one who had to decide when the bells should ring…
Fortunately, Providence sent me a teacher to serve as a daily role-model to me: my husband. Nico is an artist of routine and a master of habit. He instinctively appreciates the importance of rhythm in daily life. Now, we’d been together for a dozen years, but during these years I always had a reason why I would not learn from him: we were simply too different from one another. In my mind, I saw Nico as being someone who was content with the ‘little life’ of daily habits and routines. I, on the contrary, wanted a life of adventure, excitement, the extra-ordinary and certainly no routine. I did not want to be ‘held back’ by the fetters of time!

It has taken all these years and all these experiences combined, as well as the listening to and reading books by numerous motivational and ‘how to’ motivational authors and speakers, to finally come to my senses and realize that the only way to become a master in any field is to master yourself first. And that means mastering – among other things – your time. Just like Nico already did!

So:-
- if you’re also plagued by the ‘Wandering Spirit’ that draws your attention away from the here and now ‘on the wings of inspiration’ to whatever has caught your fancy at that particular point in time, or

- if you’ve become a play ball in the hands of others, being thrown around based on their needs, day and night,

Then, dear friend, I suggest that you do the wise thing and learn from your own and my mistakes and personally take control over your time.

One technique which I picked up from one of the coaches I have been working with, is to draw up a schedule for every day of the week and then use my mobile phone alarm as a ‘bell’ to mark the time when ‘time’s up’ for one activity and when I need to start with the next one, regardless if the first one has been completed. It simply will have to wait for the next period of time allocated to it. I now feel as if I have my own, personal ‘bell ringer’ in my pocket to help get me into a routine of habits that will set the scene for my ultimate success!

Another technique I’ve learnt is to observe and adopt the habits of the person who has achieved what you want to achieve. Your goal may be different, but I realized that if I want to make all the dreams I have come true, I will have to become a billionaire! Now, you probably have heard the ‘urban legend’ about Billionaire Bill Gates, namely that timewise it would be cheaper for him to continue walking to a meeting, than to stop for a second to pick up a 100 dollar bill that someone had lost… At his current worth of 58 Billion Dollars, every second of his time is valued at $1829.-

I’ve never liked the saying ‘time is money’, and money is not the only reason why you should follow my (and all successful people’s) example of taking control of your time: scheduling time with your loved ones is worth more than all the money in the world.

But the bottom line is, if you want to be successful – whether this means being a world-class Golf Player, a Millionariess or a Billionairess, you have to start treating your time as if you were hugely successful already… adopt the habits of someone who already has what you want; – someone who understands the incredible value of his or her time.

PS: If you want to have ultimate control over your own time, spend less time on earning money and more time with your family, follow the example of other successful individuals as explained on www.reinedelarose.com