Take control of your time

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…

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 at Lüneburg, Kwa-Zulu-Natal, where I spent the greater part of my childhood. This was and remains to date one of the most idyllic places to grow up. The school is situated on a farm in the lush, green area of northern KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa. When I was attending school there, 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.

The school orchestra at Lüneburg Primary School in KwaZulu-Natal

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 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. 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. For the first time I had a visual image that I could understand easily to explain my lack of time management. I needed to manage the’Wandering Spirit’ inside me…

Students at the Themba Education Centre in Dirkiesdorp, Mpumalanga

Getting to grips with time became an increasing challenge during the past couple of years, when I  tried to combine serving a highly demanding consulting client with rescuing the Themba Trust, a struggling, rural non-profit organization, growing an own 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 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…

Making time to watch a waterfall: a symbol of time rushing past. This one is on a farm in the area where I grew up.

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 playball 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’ve learnt, is to learn as much as you can about, and adopt the habits of, the person who has achieved what you want to achieve. 
Now, you probably have heard the ‘urban legend’ about Billionaire Bill Gates, namely that time wise 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 then worth of 58 Billion Dollars, every second of his time was 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 Millionairess 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.

NOTE: One way of taking control of your time, is to make time to maximise your health and wellbeing. At Reine de la Rose Eco.Spa Wellness & Aesthetics Clinic in Muckleneuk, Pretoria, I work with my team of professionally qualified therapists to help you achieve this goal. Find out more about us by clicking here.