Time Allocation: The Art of Balancing Refusal and Acceptance

Allocating time is dividing your daily, weekly, and monthly hours between a variety of different activities. Work, and meeting the needs of family, friends, and holidays usually restrict our time. This highlights the effective time allocation to balance these matters and achieve one's ultimate goals and desires.

However, the problem is that the day has only 24 hours, and this forces people to dedicate a small number of hours between family, friends, work, and personal activities; however, our plans often change to overwhelm our time and other social activities.

The result is to spend more hours trying to make more money. Many people believe that effective time-allocation strategies will inevitably make more money, which is not true. Today's and the future's value is evident in mastering its distribution among different activities.

The Importance of Time Allocation:

The importance of allocating time lies in its limitations. This means that there is a limited period to achieve an unlimited number of desired things in life. The fair time allocation process allows you to live a satisfying and joyful life, not to mention the important role of time allocation in access to financial freedom and happiness.

Nevertheless, few people know the art of time allocation, and instead many of us are over-distributing time to the wrong things for the wrong reasons, given the fact that most of us are required to set aside 8 to 10 hours for daily work. It is common for people to over-allocate most of their time to work to increase income.

How Do We Allocate Our Time the Wrong Way?

We were taught from an early age to work to achieve financial freedom and a high source of income, and if we can make a lot of money, we will be able to use our financial resources to buy what we want in life, but let us think. If the purpose of life is to live it with all its details, how can we waste our time getting money instead of living with pleasure?

I remember a quote from the movie "Wall Street" starring Charlie Sheen: “I suppose that if I get enough money before I am thirty, I will stop the illegal business, and then I will go around China on my motorbike, but the truth is the opposite, which is what Rolf Potts referred to in his book Vagabonding: Charlie Sheen can work for 8 months as a concierge, and ride his motorbike to roam around China after that too."

This highlights a serious gap in time allocation strategies. It is the ease of wasting time or not allocating it appropriately, believing that we are working towards a future goal that can be reached today. In addition, it is common for people to underestimate activities that do not bring them an immediate financial return. Working an extra hour to earn $100 might sound better than spending an hour reading a book or heading to the beach.

But we lose sight of spending time on personal activities - which includes spending time with friends and family - in further enhancing a sense of the value of the present. For example, while you can make a quick profit from working for someone else, investing time in the pursuit of your passion or interests will make you happier and will provide you with skills that differentiate you from others.

 The bottom line, people misallocate their time due to the following factors:

1. Overestimating profitable activities.
2. Underestimating the value of happiness gained from personal or non-profit activities.
3. Believing that it is impossible to achieve or enjoy certain goals at present. 

When Do We Refuse and When Do We Accept What Is Asked of Us?

A good reason for misappropriating our time is the underestimation of the value of non-profit activities, and this often leaves us subject to additional workloads, instead of rejecting and reallocating that time to personal activities that we want to do, which makes sense when we compare the value of tangible fixed money with the value and impact of intangible changing happiness and pleasure.

So, when trying to divide your time between work and personal activities, the best way to do so is to assign a value to everything you do. For example, I ran a financial content consulting firm, in addition to working as a financial editor at FitSmallBusiness.com, so while these activities generate a constant income, my passion, goal, and desire are to write screenplays, documentaries, and books about life. 

So, it would benefit me to devote more time to short-term financial work, but it would hurt my long-term goals. I may not gain much from writing texts, but the longer I move away and postpone the book, the harder it is for me to enter the field, so while it seems wise to focus on these profitable activities, doing so will take you away from your goals. This means that people need to reject more professional commitments rather than accept them.

But of course, you cannot generalize this principle to all aspects of your life, as obligations must be fulfilled, along with our need for money, so it is impossible to refuse everything you do not want to do. Instead, time must be allocated that takes into account the familiar boundaries within the surrounding community to achieve your interests and wishes.

Practical Application of Time Allocation:

When you start distributing time, you will need to create a scale that you apply to any activity. The scale can be easily determined for profitable activities; however, people still fail to appreciate the value of their time even when they rely on financial incomes as a measure.

For example, an annual salary of $100,000 may seem like a big figure, but if you look carefully, you'll find that the worker works 80 hours a week; That's for $26 an hour, which is a small figure.

You will then need to measure other non-profit activities on the same scale. Here lies the difficulty, and to make it easier, a reference base must be built and measured based on it. Here we shall rely on hourly wages for profitable activities. For example, if you feel the nonprofit is more valuable than earning an extra $26, prioritize it and make time for it.

So, when you create a mental framework to make better decisions based on it, you need to do the following:

1. Evaluate all your activities in circulating currency.
2. Facilitate the results of all activities to be measured by hourly wages.
3. Use hourly wages as a criterion for the importance of the activity.
4. Evaluate all non-profitable activities against the reference standard.
5. Distribute your time among all the important non-profit activities whose importance outweighs the importance or value of the standard. 

The Art of Rejection and Acceptance:

Knowing the right time to invest time in personal benefit is great; however, you will not be able to benefit and enjoy yourself unless you learn how and when to refuse or accept. For example, you may know for sure that investing in your project will pay off more than working on your boss's projects, but how can you not dedicate more time to your boss's projects without getting fired?

The answer is to be both firm and flexible. The level of flexibility that employers can offer while working remotely will surprise you, and the best employers won't care about your life balance as long as you get your daily tasks done. "Mastering the Art of Rejection or Acceptance" emerges as a lifesaver for allocating your time well.

For example, all of my clients, colleagues, partners, and bosses know the daily creative writing - scripts, and blog - which I allocate from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. It is a time of unlimited creative flow for me, and despite my need for innovation and creativity in my work, my need for them in creative writing is much greater.

This allows me to balance my desires with people's needs. If I tell them that I need two and a half hours for my personal purposes, I hope they understand the situation, and after that, I spend the rest of the day doing a constant and enjoyable bid to those around me, enjoying making money and positive energy at the same time.

Generally, if you provide valuable services to your customers, employees, or employers, they should not mind making compromises based on your time allocation plan that increases your productivity, so don't be afraid to turn down some of the things that bring you extra income.

Conclusion:

The way you allocate your time is the most important strategy in your life. Effective time allocation is the division of time between profitable and nonprofit activities. You can do this by evaluating your time at the hourly rate of work and then choosing the activities that bring you the highest or most important present and future value.