Michael Altshule remarked, “The bad news is time flies. The goodnews is you are the pilot.” This is true indeed. You are absolutely in control of your time. You need to learn how to maximize your time if you want to make the most of your life. Time wasted cannot be recovered. Every second counts in the journey of life. Never allow a day pass without you doing something meaningful or taking a step towards the achievement of your major goal. Every great person you see values time. There is a saying that, “time is life.” Seconds make minutes, minutes make hours, hours make days, days make months and months make years. If you have this understanding, you will realize that every second matters to your life and destiny.
Recently I saw the statistics that the average Lagosian spends four hours in traffic everyday. Imagine four hours of your time wasted on nothing. It was when I was aware of this that I became intentional in maximizing my time spent in traffic. It’s either am listening to an educational audio tape or a life transforming message. Do you know that there is the automobile university and traffic school? Do you know that you can earn a degree just by being in traffic? It has been discovered that spending 20mins daily listening to a particular subject for five years is equivalent to having a college degree. Now imagine 20mins of daily growth compared to the 2-4hours of wasted time in life. Whether it’s being in a traffic, bank queue, waiting as someone’s guest, or waiting for your spouse to shop, If you practice this principle you will become an authority in your field in the next five years and be among the top 10 percent of successful people in your career.

Here are my top 3 tips to help you maximize your time.

• Know your strengths
  Understand what you’re good at and focus on using and improving your strengths. Do what you’re good at and what you like and you will change your life. Do things your own unique way and you will see a massive difference in your productivity. For many years we were lied to by our parents, teachers, authors, speakers, even celebrities that their way of doing things is the best way. Just because something works for somebody else doesn’t mean that it will work for you. In fact, you are unique and the way you get things done will be different than how anybody else does it.
• Leverage the strengths of others around you Once you start focusing on tasks that you’re good at, you will notice that there are areas you are not so good at. The best way to lower your productivity is to start focusing on those areas and improving them
• Have and follow a plan, One of the top time-savers is a winning plan. A good plan keeps you focused on the goal, helps you get back on track after you’ve wondered away and helps you see the shortcuts when they appear. Keeping your plan in front of you on a daily basis and tweak it as you go along, this is a sure-fire way toward victory.
• Please keep in mind that a plan doesn’t get you anywhere by itself. To turn your plans into reality, you MUST add action!

It’s never too late for you to start maximizing your time,start today