:.Timelenders.:About Us

Where it all began: a brief history of Timelenders and the Strategic Time Management Workshop
Suleman Ahmer, Founder and CEO

I was in 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.

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 hard pressed for time and began experimenting with time management techniques like to-do lists.

University of Nebraska

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.

City of Chicago

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. 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 kept being revised continually. 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.

Three modules 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.

Another area of interest for me was how visions can inspire and transform individuals and companies. I believe that true potential of people can’t be unleashed until we help them align with visions that they consider worthy and meaningful. This naturally led to counseling and organizational consulting with a number of groups in Pakistan and the UAE.

We established Timelenders in the UAE in 2007.

City of Dubai, UAE

Over 5,000 people from 40 nations have trained with us. Our training and consulting clients include local and multinational companies, not-for-profit organizations, government and the armed forces. We are currently working in Kuwait, Pakistan and the UAE.