Balance of Life: Managing time effectively

 Balance in life is necessary for all of us to lead a healthy lifestyle. There are days when we struggle to get out of bed. After all, we feel like we have nothing to do, and on other days when we cannot go to bed early because we have too much to do. Failing to balance our days can lead to chaos in our lives. It can be difficult to decide how much time we should allocate to work, how much time we need to spend on each task, and how much time we need to sleep to keep ourselves active throughout the day. Sometimes, we feel mentally exhausted even though we're physically relaxed, simply because we've used up our mental energy trying to decide what we need to do with our day. At the end of the day, we may feel like we've accomplished nothing due to our multitasking habits, which can cause us to never truly stop working and remind ourselves that we have other tasks to do. The solution is to decide when to stop working for the day. By distributing our tasks evenly throughout the week and focusing on our main project tasks each day, we can feel more relaxed and enjoy our weekends.

Managing our time is crucial in today's world. It means creating discipline for ourselves to complete our given projects. From the moment we wake up until we go back to bed, we have a lot to do. What we choose to focus on determines the results we achieve. To feel content at the end of the day, we need to prioritize our tasks. It's reasonable to assume that within 24 hours (excluding rest time) if we give at least an hour to each task, we can accomplish at least five important tasks per day.

Often, our old methods fail to produce the same results as before, leaving us feeling stuck in our current situation. This leads to procrastination, missed deadlines, late nights and ultimately, poor quality work. This can be frustrating and unsatisfying, and the consequences of this cycle are well-known. However, the solution to getting out of this rut lies within the problem itself. By examining the problem, you may eventually find a solution, which I refer to as "optimization". In the field of engineering, optimization is defined as a systematic process that uses design constraints and criteria to locate the optimal solution. If you apply this same process to your daily practices and optimize the methods you use to complete tasks, you will not only accomplish them promptly but also feel satisfied and fulfilled with your efforts. This can be an easy way to feel acknowledged and good about your life.

Similarly, if you are a student and are receiving bad grades in a particular subject, it is important to focus on that subject and break it down into specific units to identify strengths and weaknesses. Plan your study time accordingly for the upcoming weekend.

As an office employee, if you start in the morning and stay up in the evening but still can't accomplish what you intend to in a day, you either spill over to the next day or have to stay late to show your coworkers and employees that you are a hard worker or dedicated when in reality, you are just an exhausted soul. So, the solution lies in optimizing your day. Before you start pondering on how this can really happen, let me present a solution to the problem, which can be followed by the steps given below:

Brainstorming: The first step towards optimizing your day is to brainstorm your daily activities and routines. Use a digital device or traditional pen and paper method to note them down and measure your performance visually. This can be the hardest part, but once you get in the zone, you will enter into the world of optimization, and things will become easier for you to take with the fl
ow. While doing so, you may come across many activities that would not feel different while performing them, but when you see them written on paper in front of you, you would see what impact they can produce if eliminated. But, "stop there." Brainstorming and writing them down is your priority, and optimizing is in step 2.

Checking & Eliminating: By your intelligence, when you are done with the first step towards optimizing, you move on to the second step, which is checking and eliminating. While doing so, you need to see which activities are hampering your progress and eliminate them from the list. You might find them important for a while, but here you would have to follow the 20/80 rule, which states that 20 per cent of the activities bring 80 per cent of the important results. Therefore, you need to optimize your activities according to that 20 per cent, which is essential for your daily work and eliminate the rest. You might feel that eliminating them can affect your work, but when you see them in the bigger picture, they would exist but in tiny and insignificant points that would not impact you as much as you might think.

Optimization: After breaking through the individual tasks that you might have been performing in a wrong way or might be putting more time and energy than required, you are ready to adopt which are essential to maintain your productivity and which you need to work upon to bring more efficiency to the work input you are giving. Optimize the steps that you plan to adopt.