How to Free Up Your Time

Did you know that the average person spends 40 minutes on Facebook and watches five hours of TV, per day? Sure, it’s important to let loose and relax, but in most cases we’re letting these low-value activities take priority over more important tasks. Maybe you feel like you don’t have enough time to accomplish your goals, when actually you’re just spending it away on the wrong things.

So what I would suggest first is to understand where exactly your time goes. For a week, carry a schedule and track how you are spending your time. Be honest about the time you spend surfing Facebook or watching YouTube videos before or in between work. Note all the minutes you spend talking to co-workers or family, eating, exercising, etc.

Once you have this schedule, go through it very carefully in the following ways:

• Think critically about how important each of your daily tasks are. Obviously, spending time with loved ones is up there on the scale. Same with eating, working out, etc. But what about answering emails? Necessary, though probably not as important as finishing a major report for work. Start learning to schedule your time so that you cater to your most important and valuable tasks, i.e. the things that’ll get you closer to your goals, both in your personal life and career. Get to the low-value tasks when you can, or simply delegate/outsource them.
  
  
• Schedule appointments with yourself. Throughout your daily life, you probably schedule appointments with other people all the time. Meet with a client, take your kids to the doctor, etc. But have you ever made appointments with yourself? I know it sounds rather silly, but scheduling blocks of time is essential to getting things done.
  
  This is different from simply setting aside time to do something, because you’ll tend to view it as “free time.” And when we have free time, we let distractions and other tasks (checking Facebook, taking phone calls, etc.) pull us away from what we really want done. If you’re sitting down with a client, on the other hand, you would focus solely on his needs and expectations. This is the kind of focus you should devote to the tasks you consider to be high-value. Don’t take phone calls, don’t check social media. Take the appointments you make with yourself seriously.
  

• Watch for gaps. Do you have extra time in between tasks where you have nothing planned? For example, maybe you’re meeting with eight clients per day, but you have fifteen-minute breaks between meetings. Think about what these breaks accomplish, and if they’re really necessary. If you’ve scheduled them to take care of smaller tasks throughout the day, such as answering emails, you’re probably not using the time in the most efficient way possible. Fifteen minutes is not enough time to do anything of substance, especially when you know you have another appointment coming up.
  
  Instead, try tightening up your schedule so you can free up the minutes wasted on those breaks. In our example above, if you run your meetings back to back, you’ll free up two hours! That’s a lot of extra time. Setting your meetings up this way can also prevent them from running overtime, because now you don’t have that extra 15-minute leeway to fall back on.
  
  
• Plan ahead. At the end of each workday, spend a few minutes making a schedule for the following day and think about the top three things you want to accomplish. When you plan things out ahead of time, you’re less likely to spend all night/weekend worrying about or trying to remember what you have to do the next day. That means you’re actually free to enjoy your time off and away from work.

The above tips will give you a head start in terms of managing your time better. Be sure to take action, and I look forward to hearing your success stories.

Until next time,
Jared Polak