Most people think of time management as a system for organizing the day or week in order to maximize efficiency. I'd like to propose a different view of time management that is complimentary to the traditional view but has far greater implications for your quality of life.

Rather than viewing time on the small scale of a day or a week or a month or even a year let's think of how effective your time has been over a lifetime.

There are 8,766 hours in an average year. This means that by the age of 20 you have lived 175,320 hours, by 30 it is 262,980, by 40 you have lived 350,640 and by 50 the total hours lived adds up to 438,300 on so on.

My question is; are you getting value for those hours? If you were paying someone, by the hour, to build a magnificent life would you be happy that you had got your money's worth if that person had built your current life in the total number of hours that you have lived?

With traditional time management it is easy to become super efficient each and every day and yet when viewed over a lifetime you have really not achieved anything magnificent or inspiring.

My suggestion is this; that at the beginning of each week, before you plan yours days and hours for the week, you imagine yourself looking back from ten years in the future. Then ask yourself; what do I need to do this week so that when I look back I will honestly say that those ten years were a magnificent part of my life and I am totally and enthusiastically proud to have lived them.

The only time that you can actually use is the precise moment that you are presently experiencing. However without a frame of reference most people fritter away those present moments. By viewing each moment as a dot of paint on the canvas of a magnificent life then it is far more likely that you will treasure the moment and use it to enhance your life.

At the start of each month repeat the weekly exercise but instead of thinking from the perspective of ten years into the future think from the perspective of look back from the last few moments of your life. Imagine that you have finally run out of time and you are assessing whether your life was a success, a failure or just another average existence. What would you really like to see? what sort of life would you really be happy to have lived?

Once you have this picture in your mind ask yourself how you need to use your time in order to be contributing to that amazing adventure that your life should be. There are many different religious and philosophical views on life after death and reincarnation and planes of existence but the only things you can be sure of is that you have this life that you are experiencing now and that one day this life will be over.

Life is not a practice session it is the real thing. Every moment you live is a little piece that, when taken together with all the other moments, creates your unique life. The clearer the picture you have of that life as a whole, the easier it is to know where and how this present moment best fits into that life.

Try the weekly and monthly exercises outlined above as you will find your life taking a more inspiring direction.