How losing track of time kills our success

"God loves most those actions that are consistent, even if little"

أحب الأعمال إلى الله أدومها وإن قل

Prophet Muhammad

Last time I posted something in this blog was a little less than 2 months ago. That's not, in any way, the longest time I didn't blog! My blogs witnessed periods of much longer silence. However in my last post I talked about how I was going to change my life. I wanted to use blogging as a helping tool to keep me focused and making improvements.

The desired change is not to happen quickly, what matters is consistency. The major problem of people not improving is lack of consistent effort. All of us want to make positive changes. But most of us work toward our goals for a day or two, then we stop. We forget. We get distracted by little, insignificant things. Then one day we accidentally find an old piece of paper listing some good and easy actions, we look at the date that our own hands had marked in there, only to be shocked that it has been a year, and we still didn't do or change any of it!

When I wrote my last post about my intention to change my life, I "thought" that I was going to blog once a week. Today I looked at the date of this last post and "discovered" that it has been almost 7 weeks! See, "thinking" that I was going to do something was of little benefit, if any!

That's not the only example that I can remember from my personal experience of how losing track of time hurts my goals and improvement. I wasted money because of it. I lost good opportunities because of it. My life unnecessarily stayed the same longer than it should, all because of it!

One way of fixing this habit of losing track of time, and therefore staying focused, is to actually keep track of what we do. In order to do that, I created logs for the tasks that I am working on, no matter how little they were. I made it a point to do it on paper in order for them to be accessible all the time. From experience, creating a Word file can't work as a log, the time of turning on the computer will just burry them in digits as long as the machine is dormant!

I brought a few pieces of paper, the size of a notebook, and dedicated everyone for a type of task that I usually had trouble being consistent with. One for cleaning and organizing my room. One for friends' requests that need to be done. A log for some little healthier changes that I need to do daily. Etc. So far, those logs didn't make me a new person, and I didn't suddenly become un overachiever! However, my productivity, since I started those paper logs, became slightly better. I finished things I wouldn't have finished. Other things remain postponed. One way logging helps is brining the passing of time under light. Now I can look at the "Room Organizing Log" and, to my surprise, find out that it has been 2 or 3 weeks since I did any maintenance in my room. No wonder it looks messy then!

I believe that awareness increases our productivity. The lack of consistency is largely due to forgetting. Our to do lists that never wake up and come to life were just forgotten once we wrote them. And time passes away so easy when we are in this state of semi sleep. We literally spend much of our life sleepwalking! Those are the times we don't move forward, the months and years that pass by and our life is still exactly the same.

I am logging my life to save myself from more time sleepwalking. Sleepwalkers usually wake up to the shock of hitting a wall or the horror of falling into an abyss. Walking awake is the only guarantee to reach a destination!