The above quotation is the last and probably the most difficult of Rudyard Kipling's criteria for being a successful, mature person. In one sense, if you live for eighty years, you can afford to waste a few of your forty million minutes of life. But in a larger sense, now is the only time that you can live this particular "unforgiving" minute of your life, and a mature person has learned to cherish each and every one of them.
This does NOT mean always keeping your "nose to the grindstone". A perfectly balanced life would be one-third sleeping, one-third working, and one-third playing. For those of us fortunate enough to get paid for doing what we enjoy doing, "work" is mostly "play." And many of us like to spend some of our play time doing things that many others do as work. Hence, the goal of managing one's time is as much to insure that you get to do things you want to do as that you do the things that you have to do.
How often have you felt that there just isn't enough time, that you can't seem to catch up with all the things that need to be done? This exercise in time management is intended to make you more aware of how many minutes there are in your life each week, and to help you use more of them to your advantage. Please understand that a weekly schedule is NOT a rigid program that has to be followed right to the letter. Think of a schedule as a flexible guideline that you probably will never follow exactly, but that can better organize the routine aspects of your life with give-and-take for events that come along.