“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying ‘I don’t want to’.”
Lao Tzu
We have 168 hours a week. Yet, we often feel like we do not get to what we want to do. Between work, family, chores, sleep, and other obligations, it seems like there are very few chances to relax, let along pursue our greatest ambitions.
There are a lot of “life hacks” on how to maximize time management, but most of them either focus on doing more in limited time or how to be quicker with tasks. Being more effective and efficient is a good start, but it doesn’t solve the systematic issue. The answer isn’t always to do more with fewer minutes.
Instead, you should focus on tracking how you are spending your time, think about how you would like to spend your time, and then pursue strategies to maximize time doing what you want to while still hitting your obligations mostly stress-free.
Learning how to improve time management skills is about learning what you want to focus on.
How to Better Manage Your Time
1. Figure out how you want to spend your time
The first step is to figure out how you would like to be spending your time. It can be helpful to start by thinking, “if I didn’t have any obligations, what would I like to do?” Dreaming like this is a fun place to start. Then get slightly more realistic, “given my current responsibilities, how can I incorporate some of those activities into my day today?”
Also, look at the different areas of your life. Would you like more time with the family? More hours to devote to training for that marathon? Maybe more time to work on passion projects? Create the ideal schedule of how you would like to spend your average week, even with obligations like your career, family, and home care.
2. Make a list of needs and wants to do
Making a list of needs to do is where the responsibilities and wants arrive. Think of your typical week, what are your daily and weekly obligations? This can be working 9-5, making dinner for the house, and seeing family. Add in your wants to do, these are things you want to do but don’t have to do every day or every week. Maybe it is more time learning to oil-paint or planning that dream honeymoon.
To learn how to do this more effectively, see the ideal lay-out for a to-do list here!
3. Track your default time
On the Afford Anything Podcast, John Zerarsty recommends tracking how you spend your 168 hours for a week. Tracking your time can be as generic as, 7 AM-5 PM at work, all the way down to specifics of how you spend every minute at work. Whatever works for you. This time logging will reveal how much of your life you spend doing various activities instead of how you think you spend doing these activities. How much time do you spend commuting? How much time is spent making meals? Showering? Exercising? Spent with family?
When I did this, on the weekend I found I had a total of six hours that I wasn’t doing anything particularly productive between Friday-Sunday. It wasn’t even time spent relaxing with activities I enjoy! It was twenty minutes here or there spent on social media or meandering around. That might not seem like a lot spread out over three days, but that is almost a full workday that could be dedicated to relaxing or working on passion projects. Instead, it was adrift to this void of “miscellaneous time” that wasn’t spent in either relaxation or productivity.
Identifying how you currently spend your time is important for making adjustments later.
4. Use a weekly reflection
At the end of the week, reflect on how you spent your 168 hours. See what areas can be improved. Maybe it was spending ten minutes each morning zoned out while drinking coffee before getting showered. If that is what you like to do, keep it. That was how I found myself in the morning, so I repurposed that time to do morning meditations which is how I want to spend my mornings.
By reflecting on the week you will realize how much time you dedicate to the various areas of your life (career, family, relaxation, passion projects) while also exposing areas of the void that aren’t beneficial for you. Such as zoning out while drinking coffee, twenty minutes on social media, thirty minutes looking up cake recipes I will never bake, just for some examples.
5. Make the Schedule You Want
Know that how you spend your time during the week, keeping in mind obligations, what would you like do with your hours? It doesn’t have to be a full 180 the second week, all of a sudden hitting our ideal schedule and goals for each day. Just keep it in mind, start creating dedicated time for what you want to do.
6. Repeat this process
You don’t have to do the full exercise every-week. Make conscious decisions about how you are spending your time. Knowing how you are spending your time is the pathway to start making the life we want for ourselves.
5 Tips for Better Time Management
I know this all sounds great, but executing on making time in our lives is still a challenge. I am not going to pretend it is effortless. Modern life is very demanding, but that means we just have to work a little harder to make the life we want. The payoffs are worth the learning curves and annoyances. To help flatten the curve and eliminate the annoyances, use some of the below tips to help out.
1. Carve-out dedicated time
Look at the want-to-do list. These are usually either items that involve self-care, relaxation, relationship time, hobbies, or passion projects. Because of life obligations, the want to-dos are pushed to the backburner. Instead, carve out time for them. Carving out time doesn’t have to be hours. It can be as small as ten-minutes of time to draw right before bed. The sense of accomplishment and feeling that you can make time for what you want in your life can be empowering you to take action and create the schedule and life you want.
2. Make distraction kryptonite
John Zerarsty also said in the Afford Anything Podcast to cause friction with your most common distractions. By tracking your time, you become conscious of what those time-sinking distractions are for you. A common one is social media, to cause friction, this means logging off each time and having a randomized password for your accounts. That way it is difficult to remember and log-back in unless you have a dedicated purpose to using the site. Sometimes, this even means deleting the app entirely.
Having distraction kryptonite doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your distractions; it just prevents them from being time sinks. For me, I realized I would spend hours each week looking at Pinterest recipes trying to figure out what to cook. To prevent this, I have dedicated time where I look at recipes (30 minutes), and by the end of it, I have to have my recipes for the week. Setting a specific time amount prevents me from going down the Pinterest rabbit-hole and wasting precious hours that I would rather be spending doing other things.
3. Plan ahead
Not having a plan is a sure-fire way to spend the day working on trivial matters and meandering from task to task. Instead, plan. Before leaving work and before the night is over, write out the most critical activities that need to be accomplished tomorrow. Then the following morning, review that list and pick the top three or four things. Picking your objectives gives goals to work towards while knowing where to spend the time.
4. Do more with less – Most Important Tasks (MITs)
With your most important tasks, focus on what has the most impact. Borrow from the Pareto Principle or 80/20 rule. Which states that “twenty percent of the work creates 80 percent of the outcome”. Ask yourself, “What’s the one thing you can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” this saves you from saying yes to everything and overburdening yourself, leading to under-performance and stress. Instead, by planning and focusing on the MITs that generate those 80 results, you have more time for them and can also get them done.
5. Batch similar tasks
When we try to do too many dissimilar tasks in quick succession, we find our energy diminishes. There is the energy that is required for this “task switching” that takes away the energy we could otherwise devote to accomplishing tasks. Task switching can explain why we feel we are working all morning yet having nothing to show for it. If your morning is made up of a meeting here and a meeting there, with some time in the middle that is spent answering email, making a PowerPoint, and talking with co-workers, there is so much time spent switching between tasks the brain gets tired before all the tasks are complete.
Instead, batch the tasks together. For this example, this would mean, if possible, have the meetings back to back, then talk to co-workers, email, and then make the PowerPoint (taking into account the MITs of course). By batching similar items together, the brain can work more efficiently to accomplish complementary tasks.
Key summary
- You need to become conscious of how you spend your time. It isn’t that we don’t have enough time in our lives, it is that we aren’t aware of how we are spending it.
- To figure out that balance, create an ideal time log and track how the weeks go. Slowly start making the ideal into the actual day today.
Action items
Make your ideal week spent time to-do list today. Then start tracking how you spend your time. At the end of the week, reflect and use some of the strategies to start making the ideal spent into your actual day to day.
