How much time do you give to yourself? | Manage time with Sawan Kumar - Best Motivational Speaker

If you keep telling yourself you have no time to upgrade your skills, start a side business, or attend that workshop, the problem is not your schedule — it is your time management excuses. I am going to prove that you already have every hour you need, the same 24 that Elon Musk, Cristiano Ronaldo, and the poorest person on earth wake up to every morning.

Direct Answer: Time management excuses are the stories we tell ourselves to avoid auditing where our hours actually go. The fix is simple: budget your time the same way you budget money when cash is tight — write down every hour for one day, mark the three to five hours most people waste on TV and social media, and reinvest that block into one productive activity. Do this for seven days and you will recover 21 to 35 hours a week without sleeping less or working harder.

Why time management excuses are the real bottleneck, not your calendar

The richest person on earth has 24 hours in a day. The best athlete trains inside 365 days a year. The most powerful leader works inside 168 hours a week. The poorest person on earth still gets the same 30 or 31 days in a month. Nobody on this planet — billionaire, monk, athlete, single parent — gets a single second more than you do.

So when someone is shipping books, building businesses, raising kids, and learning new skills while you say "I'm damn busy", the difference is not time. It is the conversation they refuse to have with themselves and you refuse to have with yourself. That conversation is the audit.

Run the same audit on time that you run on money

Think about what you do when you are short on cash. You pull out a piece of paper. You list income. You list expenses. You circle the leaks — the subscriptions you forgot, the food delivery habit, the impulse buys. Then you cut, and the budget balances.

I have trained over 79,000 students across 74+ courses, and almost none of them had ever done the equivalent exercise for their time. They had spreadsheets for ₹500 expenses but zero data on where 16 waking hours went. As a Chartered Accountant, this is what I will tell you bluntly: you cannot manage what you have not measured. The first step out of time management excuses is a written 24-hour log, broken into one-hour slots, kept for a single working day.

The three-to-five hour hidden tax most people pay every day

Here is the uncomfortable number. Most adults waste three to five hours every single day on television, news channels, and aimless social media scrolling. This is not opinion — it shows up in every honest time audit I have ever reviewed.

Do the math. Subtract eight hours of sleep from 24. You have 16 productive hours. If you are burning five of them on Instagram reels, YouTube auto-play, and TV news that genuinely changes nothing in your life, you are losing roughly 33% of your usable day. Then you turn around and tell yourself you have no time to take a new course or build a new skill. The truth is you have the time. You are spending it on the wrong screen.

How to structure a one-day time audit (the journal method)

This is the exact exercise I give my coaching clients in Dubai when they say they are too busy to grow. Open a notebook tomorrow morning and do this:

• Slot 1 — Sleep: Note your sleep hours honestly. Usually 7 or 8.
• Slot 2 — Non-negotiables: Commute, meals, family time, gym. List the hours.
• Slot 3 — Work: Split into deep work versus shallow work (emails, meetings, fire-fighting).
• Slot 4 — The leak: TV, news channels, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp forwards. Be brutally honest.
• Slot 5 — Skill building: Reading, courses, training, networking, building something. This is usually the smallest slot.

At the end of the day, you will see in your own handwriting that you do not have a time problem. You have a priority problem. Time management excuses cannot survive a written log.

Apply the 80/20 rule to what survives the audit

Now use Pareto. 80% of your income, your results, and your growth comes from roughly 20% of what you do. Look at your log and identify that 20%. For me, it is teaching, creating courses, and one-on-one consulting. Everything else — design, editing, admin, scheduling — is either deleted, automated, or outsourced.

Your three-step protocol after the audit:

• Delete the non-productive hours completely — the TV news, the doom-scroll, the WhatsApp groups that add nothing.
• Delegate or outsource the low-productivity hours — hire a VA, use AI tools, or train a team member.
• Double down on the high-productivity 20% — push it from 20% of your effort to 40%, 60%, even 70%, and watch your revenue, bank balance, and confidence move with it.

What changes when you stop making the excuse

When you reclaim even two of those three-to-five wasted hours a day, you get back roughly 14 hours a week. That is enough to complete a full course every month, write a book in a year, or build a second income stream inside 90 days. None of this requires waking up at 5 a.m. or quitting your job. It only requires the honesty to admit where your time is actually going.

The richest, the most powerful, and the most successful people on earth are not given extra hours. They simply refuse to lie to themselves about how they spend the ones they have.

Closing

Stop telling yourself you don't have time — the issue is unaudited hours, not a short day. Your one specific next step today: take a blank page, log every hour of tomorrow in one-hour slots, and circle the three to five hours you can reinvest in becoming the person you keep saying you want to be.