
Summary – The Positive Countdown Technique
Tick Tock Tick Tock
Everyone knows the importance of time. It is so important that time is one of the most discussed subject since well, the beginning of time. Brilliant people have actually come up with a lot of time management tips to maximize the usage of time. A few that immediately come to mind is the use of scheduling, 80/20 Rule, etc.
Personally, I don’t think it matters how much time we have, what matters is what we do with the time we have. You can be 1000 years old (like some of the fictional characters in movies) but if all you did was watching television all day long, you are then no better than a 30 years old who has make his first million.
I’m sure by now we can all agree that time is very important to us. But why is it that what we do everyday doesn’t show that we truly value time? We still wake up very late every weekend just to “recover some lost sleep” (which by the way we never lost). We still don’t know what to achieve with our life and we are already 30 years old.
The Positive Countdown
We have to admit that we are not really giving time the appreciation it deserve. In this desperate time, I have to resort to an ancient technique that may help us appreciate time better. A technique I personally call “The Positive Countdown”.
Assuming you are 30 years old. And assuming you will live until you are 75 years old. That means you only have about 45 years to do everything you want to do, and accomplish everything you can accomplish. That’s 16,425 days.
Now convert that days to Dollar. You are now left with $16,425 to spend. That’s not much money, don’t you agree? We really can’t do much with it.
The next step is to write that amount of money on your whiteboard and every day when you wake up just minus one from the board. Memorize the amount and think how will you spend your $1 of the day.
Anything you do that day must be worthy and that you will have no regret losing one day of your life to it.
The Idea Behind This Technique
- We will usually get our boost of motivation when we know that the deadline is near.
- We can see money, we can’t see time. We appreciate money, we apparently don’t appreciate time. So by thinking of time in term of money, hopefully we will be able to associate that feeling of losing money to losing time.
- The technique is named Positive Countdown because, there are two ways to observe death, positive and negative way. A negative person will look at death in such a way, that there’s no point of doing anything since we are all going to die anyway. A positive person will look at it differently by planning the best way to live his life.
- For the technique to work, you must constantly be reminded of how much money you now have, and what you are going to do with your $1 of the day.
– I wonder –
Any other techniques to make us value time more?
———– Personal Note ———–
I wrote an article as a guest contributor to Lifehack.org. Tell me what do you think 🙂
Photo Credit – Michael Fillion