POSITIVE THINKING CHRONICLES :- CHAPTER NINE

Ch. 09: 
Use Time Wisely

Avoid spending time on activities that don't agree with what you want in life. The crucial thing is to consistently work towards the activities that will make your life what you want and this, in turn, will help you have a positive attitude.

Time Is Precious 

There are 24 hours in a day. At a first glimpse it seems a great deal, but in our practical every day experience we often feel that there's never enough time to do all the things that we want to do. How can we apply our time in such a way that we can get the most out of those 24 hours? 

A successful businessman once stated, "If you want to be successful in life you have to forfeit either sleep or television or both." There's much soundness in these words. To use time wisely the beginning thing we can do is to become conscious of where we are not utilizing time wisely - put differently: where we feel we're wasting time. TV has brought a lot of good things, but it's also true that it can take over much of our precious time unnecessarily. We can apply the time we save by watching less TV by doing something constructive in our own lives or by doing something good for humankind. 

It goes without saying that sleep is utterly necessary and essential. But some of the times we tend to indulge ourselves in acquiring more sleep than we really need - particularly on the weekend. So if we really prefer to write that novel, master that difficult piece on the piano or work out that fabulous business plan, we might have to become more economical in our sleeping conduct. 

Eight hours of sleep are suggested for sound health. Yet through the practice of meditation we can step by step reduce the amount of sleep we require. From eight hours it can become seven hours, six hours or even five or four hours, contingent on our individual capacity. For meditation provides us inner peace, which can replace an amount of outer sleep. It's said that a moment of real inner peace which one can experience in deep meditation can substitute several hours of sleep. 

A different thing which might help us in using time more effectively is to alter activity once in a while. By altering activity we give ourselves a break. For our mind everything gets boring and tedious after a while, so if we venture into a fresh activity the mind gets new exuberance and energy. That new joy and energy will as well help us to work much more concentrated and effectively. Then when we get enough of that task we can once again return to the former task and we'll again get new joy and enthusiasm. "Rest is change of activity," some spiritual teachers say. If we know how to utilize this little phrase of wisdom in our every day lives, we'll be taking a big step forwards towards the fulfillment of our ambitions.