Stop wasting your valuable Time

Note: This is a guest post from Armen Shirvanian of Timeless Information

If you want to see if and how you waste time, compare your current productivity to that which you have had at a winning time in your days. There is much benefit to gain from looking at a time when you felt like you were doing all the right things for a short time. You can see and reflect upon why that period of time came out feeling so good, and get new sense of how the time period you are now in is going.

You Can Stay At Your High Production State

The first thing to accept here is that you can maintain the high level of production that you have put out at some point. There is no reason you are weaker or less able now. You might have some distractions or pressures that you didn’t have when you were at your peak, but those can be pushed aside by your bigger vision. Let’s say you are a student who had a period where you were really focused on your schoolwork, and had a time where you were doing all the assigned reading given to you for a couple of months, and then slowed down since then. After a sizable amount of time passes from this period of success, you might start to feel like you can’t reach that state again. This isn’t the case, as you can reach that state, and even add to it, with new abilities you have strengthened since then.

Look At Your High Production State As The Goal

You want to view it like the high production state is where you need to be staying at, and any period where you are not at that state is a period where you are wasting some of your time and potential. This is an uplifting way to look at your effort usage. If you were once trying to sell a product to about 3 different customers every day for a few weeks, you have to now look at any time where you are not marketing at that rate as a time when you aren’t doing what you know you can do. This will keep you on an upward slope. No one wants to be told that they are wasting their time. It makes them feel like their actions are starting to look irrelevant to the masses. Using this knowledge, remind yourself when you do see yourself wasting time, according to the description I pointed out above. You won’t like the feeling, and will quickly build up some self-discipline to avoid that label, and self-discipline is the big deal.

Piano Practice Example

Let’s say you used to play a new piano song every week, and now haven’t played piano for a few years. You might think your past learning ability is out of reach, or that you have missed your opportunity. These thoughts don’t help much. Taking the experience gained from the past piano-playing, along with the confidence received from knowing this habit has already been tackled before, you can return to the routine again. There’s nothing stopping you from getting back your momentum by learning Beethoven’s “Fur Elise” within the next seven days, followed by Brahms “Brahms’ Lullaby” the next week, and Mozart’s theme from “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” the week after. You already have the skills to do so from your experience, and have more goal-setting resources at your disposal today, so you can be back in action in no time. Everyone always says “time flies”, and that means that the period of struggle to get the habit back in place will also fly by.

Work At The Level You’ve Already Shown You Can

Once your mind reaches a certain understanding, your mind will never go back to not having that understanding. In the same way, you can always return to a production ability, or winning streak, that you once had. Toss aside any blame on others, or views of yourself as no longer having the capacity, and you can again be rolling the ball up the mountain, soon enough.

Armen Shirvanian writes words of wisdom about mindset, communication, relationships, and related topics at Timeless Information. You can follow him on Twitter at @Armen.

Photo by madmolecule