Hasn’t it grown to be a cliché that time is money and that we should regard it as such? But what exactly does this mean? How did time, a unit measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days and so on get to be equalized to money, measured as an exchange value?

Time is life and life is finite. Whenever we consider time as money it makes us greedy. This view of time makes us less generous and concerned with our environment for there is no end to money and its making. But time isn’t infinite.

Having checklists, calendars and working schedules is the logical approach to good time management though it could also turn out to be emotional – arising fear, anxiety and stress. Time lost can never be recovered and as much as we might try making up for such time, we can never fully compensate for time lost. It spans into eternity and that is the whole essence of the overused saying time lost can never be recovered.

Even so, do we ever realize how much time we have at our disposal? Of course, it is 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, something we should be accountable for if we are good heralds of time. But we don’t have to tame ourselves with this fact because I strongly believe that each of us has some objectives to achieve at the end of a specified period.

And how does more time at our disposal come about?

During holidays, leaves, vacations spilled over time (after completing a task in time) and lockdowns as the one we are in.

To most of us, holidays and lockdown periods act as vacations when we celebrate and have some good time. But it is such moments that are prone to so much wastage. We end up doing nothing productive, nothing that ultimately adds value to our lives.

So, how can we make use of time, when we have no lack of it?

Pro bono work

Pro bono publico is a Latin phrase to mean for the good of the public, with the main goal being to help others. We can commit ourselves to provide services for free such as filing KRA returns, writing articles to share with the public, mentoring kids and young adults around us, engaging in community service, hosting zoom meetings to bring friends together and so on.

Improving on skills

There are so many skills that we could learn during such times. For instance:

Crocheting: How about finding passion in crocheting something simple like a scarf by learning from someone or from YouTube and spinning a thread to make something great.

Baking: One doesn’t have to be talented in the kitchen to bake. There are innumerable YouTube videos one can always learn from. One also doesn’t have to be perfect. Get into the kitchen, be messy, make a few mistakes, use simple methods at your disposal and at the end, you will hold the joy of eating a homemade cake, pizza or any other snack.

Plaiting/barbering: There are many videos out there that could guide one on how to go about shaving hair or plaiting

Gardening and poultry farming: For those in the countryside this is a perfect time to try some farming.

DIY hacks and crafts: Being creative and making items out of materials available e.g. making a mask

Polishing our talents

We can use the available time to polish up our talents, be it singing, writing poems, journals, football-playing etc.

Spicing our careers

Spicing something makes it tastier. How about you spicing your career, adding some sort of flavour to your career? We can try learning more on the software that would ease our work, those that can make us more productive at work to enable us to gain an edge. We could also use this time to learn from other people in our fields and get to know how they are getting along in their careers.

Blogging

With time invested in coming up with video clips of relevant and informative topics, doing webinars to offer advice to the public on emerging and trending issues, we can turn to be educative and entertaining to others and maybe grow our mentoring audience.

Cultivating communication

Checking up on our friends, family, relatives and those whom we haven’t conversed with for a long time is something to consider during this period. This is essential because we all feel some sense of belonging when a friend calls to just check-up on us, and engage us in some chit chat. And so, we should be able to extend this to others.

Spiritual enhancement

Abiding in Him is the best decision one can make during such a period of anxiety and uncertainty. By digging deep to articles, magazines and books that point us to God, we will get to enrich our souls and grow our relationship with God.

Recipe to effective time management

For us to realize that we have so much time at our disposal, we need to have a plan for managing time These could include:

  • Automation: This is more of focusing on how we spend our time today that will save our time tomorrow
  • Delegation: If time cannot be automated then it can be delegated
  • Elimination: The matter of prioritizing tasks is guided by urgency and importance
  • Concentration: In making our working schedules we should be flexible and way our resources and once we embark in doing some work we should fully participate in it to avoid wasting time.