Master Time Management:
How To Accomplish More Without Rush By Bob Lancer Making the most of your time requires making the best possible decision in the present moment regarding what to do or to focus on now. You cannot make the best decision possible while feeling pressed for time; you are then most prone to jumping to hasty conclusions and making choices using poor reasoning, based on superficial observation. Practice instead, Patient Efficiency, as way of making the most of each moment without rush or overwhelm. Patient efficiency involves making the most of each moment without wasting a moment worrying about not having enough time. In includes the practice of what we can call Focused Relaxation, meaning working efficiently within a calm, unrushed pace. Ironically, the more you rush the more time and energy you waste with inferior decisions. For instance, while feeling pressed for time you might react with harsh criticism when your young daughter interrupts your train of thought while you push yourself to complete a work assignment at home. Under the influence of time pressure, you hurt your child's feelings and end up feeling badly about it afterwards. The pain you caused the two of you lingers, distracting you from your best work. And now you have to spend time in an effort to repair the damage. Had you considered the situation more calmly, you could have found a loving way to deal with your child and get back to work more quickly and effectively. Feeling pressed for time has nothing to do with your situation. Rather, it is a way of responding to your situation, and it's a way that works against you. Time flows like water. The harder you push against it, the harder it pushes against you. Learn how to trust working with time instead of against time by easing up on yourself when you sense the feeling of pressure or conflict, of fighting against the flow, building up in you. The more you hurry, the more you worry about having too little time, and then the less time you actually have, because hurry and worry are unhealthy modes that eat away at your wellbeing. They also make you impatient in your relationships, creating more conflict just when you want more cooperation to support you. So a key to the best possible time management is, ironically, to slow down and ease up enough to clarify your priorities, consider the situation facing you in the present, and then choose your way of dealing with what is happening based on the integration of those two factors. A major component of this is learning to take total responsibility for what you do with your time. Stewing over how someone else is wasting your time is actually a way that you yourself are wasting your time while engaged in that reaction. Every moment is your opportunity to enjoy and to use creatively. So concentrate on functioning in line with what truly matters most to you in the present moment. The practice of Patient Efficiency takes you above time management, into time mastery, as you function with more mastery in the present instead of feeling like the slave of time's imaginary limits. When you really look at your mind, you see that all time limits and deadlines are imaginary, in the sense that they only exist for you as long as you think of them. When you are really in the flow, you do your best work, produce your best results, enjoy your time the most, while your mind remains free of any thought of time constraint. It is a waste of time to worry about not having enough time, because in that moment you could be making better use of your time than that. | 
