How to save time for your ninja training? (Part 1)
By: Tarun Tomar
Tags: Scheduling, Tips, Humour, Wellness, Time Management

So what’s the plan?

According to the rule 101 of being a ninja (Yes, there is such a thing called rulebook for ninjas) you must sleep for 8 hours a day.

And that means you have 16 hours left out to do other things, isn’t that a lot of time?

A good Ninja always plans his/her day before starting up so that he/she won’t end up in a messy clutter of things that were supposed to be done before sleeping.

Ok so we will have to plan our day. Cool. But how? And aren’t we already doing it to some extent everyday? What’s new here?

Remember that brick breaking technique I talked about in the beginning? No we’re still not gonna break bricks as of now but I’ll tell you a simple version of that trick right now :)

Break your tasks into categories and your day into intervals before planning it out.

I have no idea what are you saying?

A ninja is well aware of the fact that we aren’t equally active throughout a day. So we have to make sure we aren’t doing things that require more attention at time when we are sleepy.

Btw you’re reading too fast but I told you to read slowly and think after every sentence!!

Cool so we’re gonna divide your tasks into categories as :

The ones that require a lot of thinking and are of high importance. The ones that require less thinking but you have to finish them. The ones that you have to do but you really don’t want to cause they aren’t interesting or useful either.

And we’re gonna divide your day into three intervals similarly :

When you’re mentally more active. When you’re actually not that active but ok. When you’re feeling lazy, tired and sleepy.

So for senior ninja warriors like myself, We finish our first priority tasks that require us to think logically before lunch. Also until we have finished those very important tasks we don’t do the social media scrolling. Since we know that our brain is very active and logical until we have lunch, we have to make sure that we don’t waste that power by procrastinating. Put all your distractions away from yourself and isolate yourself to focus on those tasks.

Once you’re done with logical tasks then you can go ahead and scroll for sometime and it won’t hinder you’re productivity ever. This means yes, You are not allowed to check WhatsApp, Instagram etc. before you are done with task of first categories. Well now you know why I don’t reply back quickly before Noon :)

Now since we have done our A1 tasks we are going to follow rule 102 of being a ninja. It is to maintain cleanliness and stay healthy. So now we are going to bathe, have lunch and then rest for sometime. Now of-course rest is a subjective word. For a person like me, rest means to sit back, put on my favorite playlist and read a romcom or fiction and for someone else it might be staring endlessly at wall and thinking about someone.

Now starts the hard time. My experience says it’s easy to follow up tasks from category 1 and category 3, but those from 2nd category are very boring and tedious sometimes.

This is when you’re mental will power is gonna be tested. Finish your less logical but equally important tasks now in this time interval.

Only thing left out now for you is to finish up the tasks like copying assignment that require no logical thinking whatsoever and it’s not fun either. Before you sleep make sure you do that !

A simple trick that could help you is to do multiple such things simultaneously.

“Two boring things adds up to one less boring thing.” — from a unknown ninja.

One very important thing to note is that you can’t do a lot of logical tasks together or continuously, so make sure you’re not overdoing something. If you’re feeling the stage 3 during stage 1 someday then it’s totally fine to change up the schedule. Flexibility is the key.

Hey I know all this can help me fix my sh*t but I find it hard to do this everyday because I loose my motivation easily :(

First of all that wasn’t very nice of you to say all that considering the fact the end goal is to be a Ninja and that’s motivating enough.

But it’s ok if you find it hard to follow a plan everyday because of lack of motivation or for whatever reasons. There is a simple working solution to that too. After some research in ‘being a ninja’ rulebook, I have found something to keep my motivation up everyday.

You should write more often.

Let’s face it, you’re not a Ninja as of now so you’re brain’s capacity is limited. And the amount of things you’re exposed to daily is huge. So you’re brain is of-course going to enjoy salivating new interesting ideas everyday instead of following the same idea for a longer period of time. To fix this you will have to write it out somewhere or talk to someone about it. This way you’re saving the idea in a material and it’s easy to realize a idea from materialistic things than thoughts.

Take things as challenges if you aren’t consistent enough. Write them down somewhere and when you accomplish some part of them (not necessarily complete them) go back and tick them or cross them. The feeling, when you’re gonna write #Day x completed, would be your motivation to keep doing it. Another thing is to go ahead and tell some person who is important to you (for eg. your crush or the person you don’t like) that you are doing this new challenge sort of thing. I promise this would be enough to keep you motivated for the rest of the time.

Ninjas do meditate everyday and you can try that too.

Conclusion

Stop, wait a minute. You read the whole thing? That’s means you focused on some task consistently without getting distracted, isn’t it? Congrats you just advanced to level 2 :)

Look around. It’s a beautiful time (fool your brain into thinking this). Let’s take a 30 days challenge to plan your days and work accordingly.

Then we’re gonna analyze on day 31. If it worked then ok and if it didn’t then hey it didn’t cost you anything and now you can at least try new ideas consistently without loosing motivation in between!

I’ll keep an eye on you during the whole time and if I’m impressed enough I might take you to ninja town and teach you how to break bricks without actually hurting yourself… Have fun being consistent till then.

Notes from my side

I had fun writing this and I hope you had fun reading too, So now you can tell me how to improve on my ninja techniques or ask anything in general, I’m always available and open to meaningful discussions.

Also there’s gonna be another one (at-least 1) of those articles on ‘how to be a ninja series’ where I am going to talk about some tools that I personally use to make sure the sh*t is done on time everyday, so keep looking around for that too.

For now be good and have fun.