I am in my late 20s and realized that I wasted a lot of time

 Two kinds of people would be reading this answer:

1. Who want sympathy and assurance that you still got time left.
2. People who genuinely believe they have wasted their time and want to make a genuine effort to achieve something.

If you are the 1st person then I’m sorry, this answer is not for you.

If you belong to the 2nd group then this answer might help you.

Lets go by facts and logic rather than blindly saying “ohh, you have a lot of time still left”.

No matter if you are in your 20s, 30s or 40s. If you feel like you have wasted past X years of your life means it’s a fact and cannot be changed.

The good thing though is that you have a realisation of the time you have wasted, unlike other people who are still delusional.

The very first thing you would need to do is to accept the fact and later analyse the cause of why exactly have you wasted X precious years of your life.

1. Analyse what went wrong:

Were you lazy? or were you engaged in some activities which consumed your time?

What exactly was the thing which made you waste your time.

Were you spending all your time on social media or were you in a relationship which took all the time away from you.

Once you are done finding the culprit, half your job is done.

2. Find a way to fix it:

Once you know what’s holding you back, you need a way to fix it.

If you feel you waste time because you are glued to phone all day, you cannot simply change that by saying “ohh, from tomorrow I will spend less time on my phone”.

We all know that never works, there needs to be some serious action taken against the thing which is wasting your time.

Like switching off your phone or using a dumb phone instead of a smartphone.

Extreme times call for extreme measures.

If there is something which has wasted years of your life then you won’t get rid of it unless you take extreme measures.

3. Keep track of your time:

Get a wrist watch and a journal, track your activity by every hour.

Note everything you have done in your journal by every hour.

I know it sounds silly but you won't be able to tell if you have improved unless you have some metrics to measure your performance.

Review your time journal at the end of the day to see how you did.

Once you do it for about a week you will realise how well you did and it will give you a sense of satisfaction and you will feel in control of your time.

4. Achievement comes from efforts:

People tell me, I’ve invested X months on gaining a skill or X years working on my business yet I am not successful.

The reality of the situation is they are tracking the wrong metric, what really counts are the efforts.

You can achieve more than other people in the same about or even less time by putting in more effort.

To sum it up:

Realise, analyse, fix, track and put in the effort and you should be good.

Hope this helps.

  -Saurav Sharma

It is easy to succeed