'Wouldn’t it be wonderful to read all those books and publications as soon as they arrive?'

Successful people says Med, are the ones who have learned how to make time ‘work’ for them!

Med, or Med Serif is, as we all know, the author of How to Manage Yourself!

While reading through each line and each page of glorious snippets on time management from Med, I’m so reminded of those immortal lines we all have gotten on our minds from Shakespeare’s Macbeth!

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

Yet another connect would be from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which brings out the character of Prufrock, who ‘stills’ time, or seeks to arrest the progress of time by never choosing to do anything! Although he seems to grow old, he cannot yet make up his mind! He does not have the necessary courage to act, or to do anything, anywhere, anytime in his life! Rather, he remains a mere passive observer than being a steward or an agent to his own life! Therein lies the overwhelming question of Prufrock: 

Do I dare Disturb the universe?  In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

How true these mighty lines mean today, decades after they’ve been published!

Just let’s sit back and well, let’s look back on how many times we’ve remained such ‘passive observers’ to what’s happening to our very own lives, subtly entangled in a virtual reality, blissfully unaware of what we’ve really got to do with our precious lives, what with our technological gadgets in hand, whiling away our ‘times and tides’ on all these trifles, that are absolutely inconsequential, inessential and immaterial to our lives in any way, whatsoever! 

In this process of hip, hop, jump and skipping reality, we don’t seem to realize the truth that ‘the one thing that’s really needed’ seems to have taken a huge backseat in our lives! Like Prufrock, we’ve become mere passive observers, than being stewards or agents to our own precious lives!

In this respect, let me share with y’all a wonderful mail that I’d received from one of my students this last week! He had just mailed me to tell me that he has quit a couple of social networking sites, because he felt that he was wasting more than five hours a day on mere trifles that did not mean a thing to the advancement of his goals and achievements! And he listed out a whole number of reasons for his robust resolve, that were so convincing and so in tune with the techno-bakhta (techno-buff) scenario of today's!

In fact, on a similar vein, I remember reading a book that promotes a digital detox, where the writer beautifully brings out this exact awareness! To him, social networking sites like, for instance, facebook or an instagram, pander elegantly to cater to our pleasure, only by making us feel an ‘inherent lack’ deep within us, which, say the zuckerbergs, could be remedied, redressed or addressed only by accessing their ‘therapeutic’ networking sites! However what they fail to tell us is the candid truth that, these social networking sites, that make us consume ‘random pieces of content’ to their own advertisement-driven will and wish, churned out by the minute, and by the hour each passing day, 24 x 7 of our lives, take quite a great toll on one’s mental health!

The simple reason why facebook makes people sad, is when, at that very moment, when they realize, after surfing through its hundreds of posts, that they’ve wasted their productive time in such unproductive trifles. This in fact, makes them sadder and badder each passing day!

Social comparisons of the lived realities of their facebook friends, also led to heartburns, especially when their friends take pride in posting/sharing vacation clicks, dine-outs, selfies and snaps of group picnics et al on their walls! These comparisons led to added depression and failing mental health, experts opine!

In that respect, full plaudits and kudos to this resolute kid of ours, who’s taken a single step, a sure step and a convincing step towards securing his dynamic future in such a noble way, away from unproductive trifles, that have thus far had a debilitating sway over his mental health in the long run!

I for my part, gave him a host of activities that could make him keep tuned to a beautiful reality far far far away from this sickening, maddening, addictive virtual reality!

In this regard, Med Serif’s book, How to Manage Yourself, although written almost four decades back, prove such an invaluable fall-back option for today’s techno-driven society that so innocuously whiles away such precious time on mindless trifles!

It is here, that Med seeks to highlight the fact that, highly ‘successful people’, have proved time and again that others can also learn how to make the most out of each working day!

When you achieve this peak, of amazingly managing on your time, you need no longer fear those Friday or Saturday afternoons with a pile of work left undone, he adds! Time has now become your servant. No longer are you a time-killer!

Med then proceeds to give out his invaluable inspirational nuggets on how to acquire more time, or ‘more hours to our day’!

He says –

You can acquire more time. Yes – time, like any commodity, can be bought!

Here are some helpful hints from Med for us all –

1. Get up fifteen minutes earlier to avoid the morning rush and also streamline the procedure for getting out of your home. You can do this by keeping your personal items grouped together, ready for use. It’s also a help to decide the night before what to wear and to have your clothes laid out. You will arrive at work feeling much more relaxed when you eliminate morning fumbling.

2. Increase you reading and writing skills. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to read all those books and publications as soon as they arrive? You can learn to increase your reading speed too, this way, he opines!

3. Develop the habit of making good notes. Store your ideas, facts, figures, and bits of information. Keep reference files and tickler files to guide you in your everyday activities. The good note-taker finds that she can drop even the biggest problems and come back later to pick up the threads without wasting time trying to remember facts!

4. Be decisive and act fast. For instance, answer your correspondence at once and you will be rid of almost 95 per cent of it.

5. Control your telephone. This fine invention saves you time-consuming travel. Instead of ‘legging’ it down to see somebody, pick up the phone. It is a fast way of getting information, of checking facts, or for giving instructions.

But this same telephone can become a monster if you allow yourself to be drawn into time-wasting bull sessions. Cut out any nonessential phone calls that you have gotten into the habit of making. Before you make a business call, make sure you have everything you need at hand – pencil, note paper, any pertinent data, and the phone number and extension you will be calling.

6. Keep idle chit-chat under control. Purely social conversation is important to building good business and social relationships. It’s good for morale and it also helps relax the tension. But it can be easily overdone. A twenty-minute fish story is probably eighteen minutes of waste.

After outlining quite a few other nuggets in like manner, Med then signs off on a very fervent and passionate note. Each of us is allotted only twenty-four hours a day. The time we waste is your very own. If we make intelligent use of our time, we can be assured of the satisfaction that comes from the success we achieve in our work, and from the added hours we can begin to spend with our loved ones, he says.

Excerpted from Med Serif’s How to Manage Yourself

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