It all started in 1981 in Abbottabad, a small town on the foothills of the Himalayas in Pakistan.

I was in the 8th grade when I was sent to Abbottabad Public School, a boarding school, where I developed a fascination with time. Modeled after the military, the school kept us on our toes round the clock. The studies were timed and so were the games, the recreation (an hour of supervised television a week) and even eating. Success was doing more in less time. I learnt that exercise allowed one to get away with less sleep; cold water shortened shower time; simple food was quicker to eat; difficult assignments were best done at 4:00 am; and sleeping late was simply a bad idea.

I was moved then by a verse by Kipling which has never left me since:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute
with sixty seconds' worth of distance run --
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
and -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!

Later during my studies at the University of Nebraska, I was pressed harder for time, and began experimenting with time management techniques like to-do lists.

Soon after, I started working for a multinational group in Chicago and traveled extensively to Europe and Central Asia. Fast growth was placing a huge demand on our officers’ time and I decided to design a time management training. Having read and reflected for years, this was my chance to test my ideas.

The training proved effective and people from outside the company started requesting to join. In 1999, I conducted my first public training for thirty people.

I later founded Timerunners in Chicago, a part-time affair. Under its aegis, by the time I left for Pakistan, a few hundred people had been trained. I established Timelenders in Karachi in 2002.

Initially, I only taught the ‘Strategic Time Management (STM) workshop’ and the training kept evolving over the years. The definition of STM went through continual revision. New ideas and modules were progressively added. The technical definitions of 'important' and 'urgent' continually evolved and lately we added the value/want and the important/like grids to help people identify their worthwhile goals and monitor their progression towards achieving them.

Three separate trainings spun off from the main training: the Strategic Visions Workshop which helps us understand the technicalities of setting up a vision whether corporate or individual; the Sleep Management Workshop and the Where Do You Want to Go Workshop which helps us look at the Islamic perspective of visions. Now we have added other workshops to our portfolio through alliances with other professionals has helped us add other workshops to our portfolio over the years.

Another area of interest for me was how visions can inspire and transform individuals and companies. I believe that the true potential of individuals and groups cannot be unleashed until we help them align their efforts with the visions that they consider worthy and meaningful. This naturally led to counseling and organizational consulting with a number of groups within Pakistan and abroad, in the UAE. We established Timelenders in the UAE in 2007.

It is an honor for us to have served over 25,000 people from 75 nationalities, , including Kuwait, Bahrain, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the UAE, with our courses. Our diverse clientele includes local and multinational companies, not-for-profit organizations, the Government and the armed forces.