The Conquest of Time

I believe in making lots of mistakes so that I can learn from them and pass the wisdom on to you. If you do nothing else but read this blog and heed my hard-won wisdom, I promise you will be spared from the following no-no's:1) Underestimating the value of mental fitness2) Putting blue cheese in an omelette3) Being time's bitchI've already covered 1 here and 2 here, so let us move swiftly onward to 3.Have you ever felt like time is this crushing thing that wants to destroy you? That no matter what you do, you will never ever accomplish the things you feel you must? For some reason, this has been my dominant mental state for about three years now. It has very little to do with any real demands made on my time. I have enough time to meet my deadlines, have a decent social life, floss, etc. It's just that I feel as if I don't. It's almost psychedelic. But not in a good way.Over the past few months, however, I've stumbled across a few ways to hack around this crushing feeling and make time my bitch. I offer them to you:1) Stop reading and watching the news. If there's something big happening, you'll hear about it. The rest is just a means of making you angry and frightened. If there's a particular subject that intrigues you, knock yourself out, but don't be fooled into thinking you must be broadly informed about what's going on in the world. This is a sucker's game and, really, nothing more than a means of selling you toothpaste. I trust you all know how to buy toothpaste by now. Unless you are going to do something with the mind-numbing flow of data, why bother having it? It takes up not only the time devoted to gathering it, but the time devoted to thinking about it. Plus there's a huge emotional toll whether you realize it or not.2) Front load your schedule. That means cutting all of your deadlines in half and killing yourself to meet them. Just knowing there's fat built into the schedule alleviates stress (which is an an enemy of efficiency). Plus, tasks tend to expand to fit whatever time you allot them. Allot them less and they get done quicker.3) Wake up at the same time every day, with an alarm if necessary, and earlier than you think you should. The general rule of sleep health is that you should get out of bed the second your eyes open. Once you start doing that, your circadian rhythms will adjust and make you sleepy at exactly the right time at night to get exactly how much sleep you need.I gathered this information from various sources, one of which was The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. I can only lukewarmly recommend this book, however, because, despite some very excellent advice, Ferriss himself is a less than inspiring character who seems to put all of his tasty efficiency to use for pointless, exploitive ends. Of course, you would never put your increased efficiency to pointless, exploitive ends. You would use it to expand the benevolence of the universe somehow. Or take up crochet.At any rate, now that I am no longer time's bitch, I work better, play better, and sleep better. As for contributing to the expansion of universal benevolence, that's more of a long-term goal. Right now, I'm focused on being a better writer.Good luck, and remember, time can only make you her bitch if you let her.