The Hindu Business Line : <I>Conquest of time </I>

There is no such thing as lack of time. It is only lack of will. Nobody has more time than anybody else. Time is a democratic and egalitarian resource. Everyone has only 168 hours per week. Irrespective of how wealthy a person may be, he cannot buy more time; he cannot hoard it either. Effective use of time, like driving a car, is a skill that can be acquired by spractice.

Life is a battle between order and disorder. There are good days when people ride on the wave. There are bad days when people sink into a downside in despair. Some people have an uncanny knack to externalise their woes and outsource their misfortune.

In order to avoid the pain of failure, they resort to a fiction that the whole world is unfair towards them. The law of life is that he who thinks that he is a victim will be proved right in the long run. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Whereas there are others who never say die, who get organised quickly, who overcome their difficulties, and eventually emerge successful. It is the will to win that makes them the master of their destiny. Such people never look at the clock, nor the calendar. But they focus only on their tasks and priorities.

For them, the conquest of time is just a matter of working more systematically and with better control. Prima facie it may seem to be a paradox, but the fact is that by exercising more control over their time, people gain more freedom to deploy it. Control begins with planning. Planning is bringing the future into the present.

Benjamin Franklin had a simple solution: "If you want to enjoy one of the greatest luxuries in life, the luxury of having enough time — time to rest, time to think things through, time to get things done, and know you have done them to the best of your ability — remember there is only one way. Take enough time to think and plan things in the order of their importance."

(The author is a Chennai-based freelance writer.)

R. Devarajan

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