If there is anything anyone should cherish, keep, guard with all jealousy and zealousness, it is their time.

Time is unarguably the most precious commodity everyone possesses. And as precious as it is, it is given equally to everyone everywhere everyday–as long as they still have breath in them. The only difference is that, while everyone has equal access to time in a day, some people’s time run out before others.

Let me be less vague.

You have 24 hours in a day, I have 24 hours in a day. Everyone has 24 hours in a day. But the number of days we have to live is what differs and is honestly, what remains a mystery to us. Tomorrow might be someone’s last day, still they won’t because of that have more than 24 hours in today.

Right?

Now, to think someone would allow a minute of their time to be wasted by someone else or be wasted by themself doing irrelevant things is simply absurd and unwise, because a minute lost today can never be regained–not tomorrow, not ever. It is just lost.

As someone once said, “what you do today is important, because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.”

Whatever you do today that is not beneficial to your life, that does not add to your essential learning and growth, that does not challenge you to become a better person or add to the overall effort of achieving your dreams and fulfilling your purpose in life, whatever it may be and no matter how short a time you spend on it is basically a waste of your life.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I read somewhere that, ourselves are the easiest to fool and that’s why we let ‘us’ of the hook so easily. It is easier to indulge in things that are gratifying to self than to discipline self and condition it to endure the discomforts of ‘now’ while keeping the focus on the greater and really satisfying goal ahead. Meanwhile, the more we indulge self, the faster our lives slip by us and time irrecoverably wastes.

What you do today matters. What you do this hour matters. What you do right now matters.

If you can’t come to terms with that fact and jealously guard your time, and invest it in the right things, well…tick tock.

That’s why it is important to take a moment to reflect on what you plan to do every hour of your day.

Recently I tried a new method: tonight, I plan how, to the minute, I want my day tomorrow to go before going to bed, and then tomorrow, I try as much as possible to stick to it. I don’t let anything I can control or anyone I can avoid mess with my plan and believe me, it has been helpful. That way, whatever short time I allocate to something–be it reading or writing or learning something new– I optimise it.

When you control your time, you control your life. And by the end of each day you’d be able to look back and think to yourself, “Today was not a waste.”