It’s a known fact that we each have 24 hours per day. You can be the prime minister of a country or the loitering teenager at the mall, nothing can change this fact.

Like every rigid rules in the universe, this too can be bent. Here’s 10 method to steal an extra 3 hours from the time bank.

1) Wake up early
Try to find your minimum hours of sleeping needed. If for example you sleep for 7 hours every day, try to wake 15 minutes earlier. Keep reducing it slowly but only do that when you are comfortable with the new habit. Don’t force it.(1 hour recovered)

2) Solve problem while sleeping
What you need to do is simple. Just before you go to bed, plan what you are going to do tomorrow. Try to be as detailed as you can. It is theorized that most problems were solved when we are asleep by our subconscious mind. Imagine going through the day smoothly without having to stop when problems occur. Imagine how much time we have saved.

A more extreme method is to see the future one hour at a time. (0.5 hour recovered)

3) Filter television
Preferably just stop watching. But if you must, only watch what you want to watch. Check the schedule on what’s interesting and put that on your personal schedule. Watch ONLY that. Do not watch television just because you have nothing to do. (0.5 hour recovered)

4) Cut small talk
This is quite critical. You cut too much you are antisocial, you cut too little and it’s just pointless.

When you’re on the phone, try to have something in mind on what you want to know or tell. Unless that person is family or your loved ones, I don’t see any reason why we should be on the phone more than 30 minutes.

That goes the same thing to email, IM and now twitter 🙂 (0.5 hour recovered)

5) Walk faster
This trick is actually introduced to me when I was in high school. As juniors we are forced to walk fast to go to places. I hated it then.

Now however, I find it quite efficient to walk fast. I exercise and most importantly I save quite a significant amount of time compared to walking slowly. (0.25 hour recovered)

6) Avoid repetitive work
Your time is gold. If you need to go buy groceries, try to plan your list and avoid having to go twice. Yes, sometimes we forget. That’s why it is recommended to print out a list of things you always buy. Whenever you are going out, check out all the items in the list first. (0.25 hour recovered)

7) Delegate
Delegation is an art really. To know which task can be given to other person to do, and which to do ourself. The thing is, tasks are really never ending. Start delegating simple tasks like typing, proofreading etc (0.25 hour recovered)

8] Dedicated days
I have a tray on my desk where I put all my receipt or carbon copy of my paid bills in. Those are supposed to be filed. However if I file every receipt everytime I receive one, I will spend a lot of time just doing my filing. So I dedicate one day of the week to do filing.

You can do the same to maybe spring cleaning, or snail mail corresponding etc. Assign one day to do all of that. (0.1 hours recovered)

9) Scrap the seconds
By scrapping I mean to appreciate every seconds of your day. Imagine that seconds are like $1. What would you feel if you are losing $1 every second. Learn speed reading, read only important news in the newspaper (Do you need to know how depressed an actresss is?). Recover as much as possible. (0.1 hours recovered)

10) MOST IMPORTANT : Know how to spend the extra time
Even if you have 100 hours per day, it would be meaningless if you don’t know what to do with it. This is why it is very crucial for you to know 3 things before you start with the list.

• What do you really want in life? (loved ones, religion)
• What are your priorities? (family, job, hobbies)
• What trivia things that you need to do anyway (email lost friends, Jar Of Life technique etc)

By doing item no 10, you are basically recovering the sum of it all – 3.2 hours. Which generally means if everyone else has 24 hours, you have 27.2 hours a day!

– I wonder –
Any other tips to recover that seconds?

——— Personal Note ———-
NetworkBloggingTips is actually putting up a challenge to come up with a list-type post. This entry is my submission to the challenge. Feel free to join in.

In the spirit of the challenge. Here are some of my most recent list-type articles. More of them here

• 4 Signs You Are SIB Immuned
• 7 Ideas on How To Live Differently Everyday
• 10 Motivational Scripts Specifically For Student
• 7 Situations You Should Memorize How To Respond
• 6 Sure Tricks To Overcome Fear

Enjoy!

Summary – 20% of controlling power is better than 0%

If you were given a choice of a super power, what power would you choose?

I watched an interesting movie not very recently “Next” played by Nicholas Cage. I am more interested in his power though. He can actually see 2 minutes into the future.

Don’t think about it too much. you might get headache. Enough to say that he know exactly what will happen to him. And thus he know exactly the right action to do. He can even dodge bullets after bullets as if he were dancing.

In a way, we can apply this power in our life. Are you ready to learn it?

All we need to do is that everytime the minute-hand of our clock strike the number twelve, try to spend 30 seconds and plan what to do in the next 60 minutes.

But first, we will need to know what exactly we want from our time. If for example, you life goal is to earn more money, then ask yourself, what can you do in the next one hour that will help you make money.

Even if you are not doing anything you planned, keep practising it. You will slowly have a more goal-oriented mind each day. And this will help you achieve more from your time.

There’s no need to write what you’re doing. We actually want our life goal to be embedded deep in our subconscious mind. Trust me, the problem with this is commitment. In time, you will start forgetting to practise it, or you find it not practical. Don’t let this stop you. Keep practising it. The whole point is as previously mentioned, to embed it in our subconcious mind.

It will be more effective though if you actually do what you plan.

Tada! Now you have the power to see one hour into your future. Keep doing this, you should be able to see you entire future 🙂

You may not be able to control 100% of your future, but you are now controlling 20% of it, far better than the 0% you did previously, don’t you agree?

– I wonder –
How many of us actually plan what to do tomorrow before we go to bed?

——– Personal Note ——–
Believe it or not, one of my most played game during my childhood is a game called “Main-main”. A direct translation would be “The Game”. Filantera and DaPocket can verify this. I believe we invented the game ourselves.

At the start of the game, everyone would choose a superpower, and we would then start telling stories of how we got the power, or what good deed we were doing. It’s very imaginative. However, most of the time it went pretty much the same way, with secret identity exposed, getting the girls, bad guy loses, become wealthy etc 🙂

Good times good times

Summary – When self improvement blogs doesn’t have any effect on you

There are thousands of self improvement blogs (SIB) in the world. And we may have been following them religiously. I wonder though how many will actually remember what has been read about 10 minutes later. It’s a disease actually to spend time filtering information (reading) and at the end of the day, no action was done. Are you SIB immuned?

We all know the value of articles posted in these blogs, and how they are often practical and valuable tips. However, when you are immuned to SIB, nothing written actually prove valuable to you. Listed below are 4 signs to look for to avoid being one.

1) Clueless Information Addict
I admit, I am addicted to information. It is very satisfying learning new things, collecting this and that over the internet. Clueless information addict will do exactly that, but they don’t know what to do with the information. We read 20 over SIB but in the end, we remain the same, without applying what we read? I know I’m one.

Recommendation:

• Regularly cut down your RSS feed. Only subscribe to those you really benefit from.
• Learn the art of text scanning.
• Set up a plan immediately to make use of the information you have.

2) Day dreamer
“That person is living his dream, this person is the very definition of success. If only I can be like him”. These are some of the most common things a day dreamer will think about. They will read successful story from successful people and dream about becoming one. There’s nothing wrong with that except day dreamer usually forget to work on their dream.

Recommendation:

• Change that day dream to goals and give deadline.
• Work out practical means to achieve that goal. Baby step is the best way.
• Keep track and review any mistakes along the way.

3) Brain Tired
There are always new things to learn in self improvement. However there are a group of people who just refuse to take note on things highlighted. It can be very annoying sometimes when thousands of bloggers had written on ways to improve productivity and then this person just refuse to work on the suggestion and still asking for other EASIER methods without even trying them.

Recommendation:

• There are no other ways. The only way we can be more knowledgable at things is to learn them.
• There’s a reason why most bloggers have search function embedded in their blogs.
• Start somewhere, and work from there.

4) God Syndrome
Some people do believe that there’s nothing more you can teach him, that if there’s anything.. you should come to him for answer. Yes, there are experts out there. But that doesn’t mean anyone else’s point of view is rubbish. It is a wonder why they even read blog in the first place.

Recommendation:

• There’s nothing wrong with being humble. Your authority will not deteriorate, in fact more people will respect you.
• The same with other thing, you can only get better if you faced a better person.

Conclusion – The reason we visit self improvement blogs is to read them and try to get something from them. Most importantly is to learn practical tips to better our life. So what’s practical about this entry? To put it simply, when we can avoid all the 4 signs, we will be more goal oriented, be better networker, and hopefully be one step ahead to a better life.

– I wonder –
Anything else you might want to add?

Summary – Problem solving attitude 

The following is a story forwarded to me via email. I’m not claiming it is true, but the idea is there :). It’s Sunday, enjoy!

This is a real story that happened between the customer of General Motors and its Customer-Care Executive. A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

“This is the second time I have written to you, and I don’t blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night.but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we’ve eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It’s also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice-cream, when I start back from the store my car won’t start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I’m serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds: “What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?” “

The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an Engineer to check it out anyway. The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighborhood.

He had arranged to meet the man just after dinnertime, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough,after they came back to the car, it wouldn’t start. The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.

Now the Engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man’s car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: he jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc.In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavor. Why?

The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup.

All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out the flavor. Now, the question for the Engineer was why the car wouldn’t start when it took less time.

Eureka – Time was now the problem – not the vanilla ice cream!!!! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: “vapour lock”. It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapour lock to dissipate.

/end story

Remember: Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be simple only when we find the solution with cool thinking.

Don’t just say its “IMPOSSIBLE” without putting a sincere effort. Observe the word “IMPOSSIBLE” carefully. Looking closer you will see, “I’M POSSIBLE”…

What really matters is really your attitude and your perception.