I am a member of Tyler Morning Toastmasters, and I always enjoy and appreciate the speeches I hear. I heard one last week given by a college student named Brady Ryden. Brady talked about things that he had learned regarding time management. He offered several very practical points. One of them was that a commitment of 17 minutes daily adds up to 100 hours over a year. As we make our New Year’s goals, keep that in mind. A small investment of time will create a return on investment similar to compound interest.
Of all the recommendations he offered, the one that will stick with me the most is this. Find one thing each day you don’t want to do, and do it. That is excellent advice.
I would add to that: do it as early as possible. One reason is that the body naturally produces dopamine in activities such as this. Be productive when you don’t feel like being industrious, and your body will reward you. That’s the dopamine hit; that’s dopamine using dopamine the way it was meant to be used. Therefore, I recommend doing something we don’t want to do as early in the day as possible each day. This will give us a shot of dopamine and adrenaline like a wind to sail, pushing us through the rest of the day.
Wasting time is terrible. As I once read in a journal article*:
- You can replace the loss of a house.
- You can replace the loss of money.
- You can never replace the loss of time.
Let’s all make good use of our time in the year 2024. Plan well and budget our time. After all, as Brady quoted from the the book of Proverbs, “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty” (Proverbs 21:5) [ESV.]
P.S. The holidays are upon us. I will take a break for the next couple of weeks and will resume my posts in January. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
*See Melanie Rudd, Rhia Catapano, and Jennifer Aaker, “Making Time Matter: A Review of Research on Time and Meaning,” Journal for Consumer Psychology (2018): 1-23.