I watched a motivational video recently regarding the stagnation of young men living a life of prolonged comfort. Because of the phenomenon, the term “extended adolescence” was coined. I was expecting people in the comments’ section to crash out and say how wrong the post was.

Yet, to my surprise, there were many individuals confessing it as their truth instead. One of the comments even asked “how do I change this?” and it’s the reason why I’m writing this blog post tonight.

I gave him the classic advice. Y’know, sleep early, wake early. Be physically active. Learn useful skills. Boring, but timeless. But here’s one I don’t hear people talk about as often: time management. I believe it’s foundational aspect to life, and yet they don’t teaach much about in school.

How to unfuck your schedule

I believe there are many ways to do this but I’m going to share what’s worked for me.

Calendars. It’s so simple, yet so underrated.

“Are you serious right now?”

Yes, I am actually, because there’s layers to this.

If you’ve got yourself one of those free tiny desk calendar. That’s a start.
If you use digital calendars to map out upcoming events and milestones. That’s great.
And recently, I learned if you do all of the above and use a giant calendar analyse your entire year. That’s amazing.

Why?

Time is like a cake.

It always comes in layers. Every minute you spend creating something turns into hours of practice. The hours turn into days, weeks into months. All of which compounds over the years. Through this, everyone shapes their reality through their relationship with time. If you’ve got a healthy relationship with it, it teaches you patience and the power of compounded repetition. If you make an enemy out of it, you’ll wonder why there’s never enough time.

Unfortunately, I didn’t understand that when I was younger. I let it carelessly slip by me. I blamed it on timezones and on my addictions. Really, anything but myself. However, I’ve been a lot more mindful of it in the last few years and it’s truly life-changing when you make the most out of it.

The point of this post is that if you don’t manage time, time will manage you.
Every so often, take a step back to look at the big picture and write down the things you need to do that matter most to you. Then, zoom in on that very specific day to plan out exactly what you’re going to do to make it happen. Planning ahead is so important, and I’ve gotten much better at this in the last few years, until I printed the giant calendar recently and realised how I could improve my yearly goals too.