By Abdullahi Jamaa
Sometimes this week I was with my elder brother discussing the amount of free hours we have on a given day. We asked ourselves how many hours are there after we leave our office at 5.pm. We could count up to five-six hours where most people end up in coffee shops making endless stories until they retire for home.
This precious time after a day’s work is the redeemer of many successful men and women who mastered their profession by always putting their best foot forward. In the same breath, these hours are evidently the destroyer of many unsuccessful men and women who are lagging behind both in their careers and in their families.
Between 5 to around 11.pm most people lazily chat, socialize and mingle often spending 25% of their day in unproductive activities. Whilst it’s scientifically encouraged to socialize and enjoy time with friends and families after a day’s work, many people are overstepping their mandate for personal development and instead waste their hard-earned education, knowledge, and skills in empty talks.
Most average people have no plans for personal development; completion of their studies in high schools, colleges or universities seemingly marks the end for them. The next thing is looking for a job and they forget about everything else. Many professionals have little knowledge in their careers simply because they did not put extra efforts into understandings new things and other developments in their field of study. Thus they remain to be bare professionals.
Prophet Muhammad (SAW) advised us to: “Take benefit of five before five: Your youth before your old age, your health before your sickness, your wealth before your poverty, your free time before you are preoccupied, and your life before your death”.
The above saying will help us reflect on where we stand as individuals. It gives us the impetus to put ourselves on the weighing scale and fine-tune our daily life in order to be more productive in a fast-moving world.
We have an obligation to make use of our time very effectively and productively, we have all the free time to develop ourselves and help others too. But this comes with a lot of dedication, commitment, and sacrifice.
Let us now see how we can help develop ourselves professionally and individually. The five-point plan below will help you to chart a life-changing experience that will make you a highly productive person in a busy world where time flies so fast.
- Connect with Allah
To be productive and develop yourself you must connect with your creator and pray hard. Tackle your five daily prayers like you have never done before. Increase your engagement with the Mosque and learn your religion on daily basis.
If you are the type who still uses the same old duas and tahiyats that you learned in primary school, you need to upscale and learn more duas to make your prayers more intense and emotional. Don’t forget to do a lot of duas for a life-changing approach to personal discipline and development.
Dua is the greatest shield of a believer but most average people do it so casually. With sincere dua and enhanced daily prayers your time, health, wealth will be blessed. You will be more happy and productive.
2. Find your own time
They say time is money and so getting it may be easy but spending it is seemingly hard for many. You need to find your own time to develop yourself. In Islam, we say small but consistent actions make a change, a small action that you repeatedly do so often, even say for five minutes every day will have a profound impact on your life.
What you need to do here is to find that time to do that extra thing that matters in your life. Analyze your time and find out when you are most productive; find out where most of your time is dedicated – work, family, and friends. Tracing your day will help you forge a new course of action.
If we don’t use our time efficiently to reach greatness and do something good then we will use it inefficiently to achieve nothing but bad things. Try to hold yourself into account by avoiding wastage and abuse of time.
And once you find the time, it will be easy to plan how to practice your profession, do that extra community work, write a blog or maybe help your kids understand new things in their studies. Now start and find your own time.
3. Organize your life
In our daily life there is a lot on the table; earning a living, studying, praying, keeping the family and friends and much more. All these activities require a perfect balance. You need to organize and prioritize what comes first, when and where. Organizing your life will minimize wastage and setbacks that are so common to us.
Doing the right thing at the right time and place should be your master motivator. When there is too much on your plate and you try to tackle your tasks by priority you will feel how everything is important; from smallest to the biggest.
It will be difficult to intelligently and skillfully juggle your priority tasks without organizing yourself and that is why you will often need to list your duties and schedule them in accordance with their importance in your life.
4. Study hard and read a lot
It’s probably years since you left your last class and you need to recharge your knowledge and study hard. Knowledge is an endless process within the life of an individual; the world is developing so fast and things are changing so quickly- don’t be left behind.
Read more about your profession; learn new technologies and new ways of solving problems and issues. Reading and studying should be an everyday affair for you. You can use the internet and resources such as books to scale up your knowledge and skills.
Dedicate at least an hour or two for studying, reading or learning new things every day. At the end of the year, you will have a significant amount of knowledge that has the potential to cement your career to herald you to new horizons of life that you have never achieved before. You will have more experience and solve more problems with your newly acquired knowledge.
5. Attend networking events
Networking with other professionals through events is very vital for personal development. In such events, you will get the time to meet like-minded individuals allowing you to get to know people easier. You will build a strong professional connection and relationship with individuals perhaps more experienced than you.
Through networking you will learn new trends in areas in which you have been focusing on, hearing great ideas from those who have been very successful is a wonderful opportunity to learn. Most networking events inspire and motivate people. Your desire to achieve more in your life is rejuvenated through your meeting with progressive and positive people.
Abdullahi jamaa is the publisher and managing editor of theplu.co.ke
