One of the most popular quotes about time is “Time is Money”. The meaning is simple: time is valuable. You and everybody else in this world have the same share: 24 hours everyday. No more no less. You waste it, you lose it. It won’t come back. Ever.
The funny thing is, there are times when you feel a day last longer, and there are times you feel the other way around. Some people struggle to find more time to be able to finish their works, yet some seems to have too much time that they have to struggle to find things to do to fill their seems to be neverending supply. It seems as if time were stretch-able.
Well, is it stretch-able? Can we get extra time? Can we lose extra time? We’ll let the scientist answer that questions as they are too complicated for us common people. Time is one of the most abstract concepts in human life – along with love, afterlife, alien life form, angels, and the thought that Zune can outsell iPod.
But scientist or not, everybody knows that time flies when you really enjoy what you’re doing, and time crawls when you feel the opposite. So, if you want more time, try to hate everything that you do. :). Kidding!
But if you want to get ‘bonus’ time, say, six more hours everyday, you could try this following self hack.
Squeezing In Some Extra Time
What I’m about to tell you here is not one of the Harry Potter’s spells or some sci-fi time bending ability. It’s something far more simple that I picked up some years ago from one of the books I read (which title I couldn’t remember).
The idea is to utilize the ‘idle’ part of your days – your sleeping time – to be more productive. If you spend about six hours a day for sleeping and are able to use this sleeping time to accomplish ‘something’, you could say that you have six hours worth of extra time. Thirty hours a day!
Imagine this: you set something to do, go to sleep, and when you wake up it’s done! Logically, since you do this ‘thing’ while you are sleeping, you can’t accomplish anything that requires your physical activities such as cooking, driving or painting your house. But you can, for example: think about the solution(s) to a problem, plot the next chapter to your soon-to-be best selling novel, building words for an article (I do this a lot), arranging the notes of your song, improving your personality; anything that requires only your mind to do it. And it means everything.
The ‘how to’s
Let’s take ‘finding solution to a problem’ as our example on how to utilize the sleeping time.
- First you should prepare a pen and paper (or your computer and a word processor – technology wise) and then
- Write the goal you want to achieve during your sleep – which will be ‘finding solution to X problem’.
- Read the goal several times, make sure you remember and understand it perfectly.
- Then relax your body and go to sleep.
The first thing you want to do after waking up is writing notes on whatever ideas pops out from your mind. Don’t wait, they’ll go away fast. Those are the solutions you get after your mind processed the problems during your sleep.
This might seems difficult at first and needs time of getting use to. But after mastering it, your life will never be the same.
Is it violating the ‘brain rights’?
Some people might think that ‘forcing’ your brain to continuously working while it should be resting during your sleeping time is violating the brain rights and will eventually making the brain worn out.
Well, the truth is, the brain never stop working even when the body sleeps. Dreaming is one proof of this phenomenon. Other proofs are the fact that the heart keeps on beating and the human keeps on breathing. Once the brain stop working, the owner will surely die.
Don’t worry about it. Your brain is very capable of doing what it designed to do.
So now, all that is left to do is make a list of things to add value to your once-less-valued sleep, and start living ’30 hours’ a day.
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