Busy vs. Productive - How to create more time in the day, regardless of how busy you are!

How amazing would it be if we could just add one or two more hours to each day? As much as many of us would say "well - take off one or two hours of time at work for me PLEASE!!", realistically for most of us this is not an option. I'm sure even if we had more time, we'd still be asking for more!

Whether it’s to spend more time with ourselves, with our loved ones, or to learn a new skill or take up a new hobby. The truth is, most of us are not using the time we already have to its full potential. With a little bit of structure, analysis, and 'optimizing', we can spare at least 3-5 hours of additional time in our schedule to learn a new language, go for a run, start a blog learn an instrument, or even cooking!

Here’s a few tricks that can be really helpful in taking time off your “busy” schedule. (Life hacker).

1. Track your existing schedule

If you don’t know how you spend your day already, it’s going to be very difficult to know what’s working and what’s not. This applies in any habit, result, or goal you want to change. If you’re trying to lose weight, the first thing a nutritionist will tell you is to keep track of everything you’re eating throughout the day.

Start by tracking everything you’re doing during the day on your calendar. Keep it simple by categorizing each task into two colors representing:

1. Work time (blue)
2. Free time (green)

While all of our schedules will be different, you’ll be surprised to know how much “green” (free time) space you have in our day to invest in learning or something else more productive for you. For consistency, it’s recommended to track your schedule for at least three days, since you may have had a bad or good day of productivity.

And NO - social media scrolling is not considered to be work time!!! (Yes - I know, BUT, BUT, BUT!!!).

This information will help you with the next step…

2. Prioritize

Now that we understand how we already spend our days, it’s time to prioritize what matters. Whether you use a to-do list or a calendar to schedule your day, try reverse-engineering your end-goal to the tasks you have set for the day.

Here’s a logical framework to refer to:

• What’s my ultimate goal that I am trying to achieve? (learn Spanish, increase your business revenue, improve fitness etc.)
• Which of these tasks will bring me closer to my goal?
• Which of these tasks can I outsource or eliminate completely?

From there, we’re going to borrow what a productive framework used by Dwight Eisenhower called, “The Eisenhower Box.”

Start by categorizing your current task list and any upcoming ones into these 4 categories:

• Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
• Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
• Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
• Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

From here, you should focus only on the tasks that are in the “do” and “decide” category. Everything else, you should…

3. Eliminate

Now that you have your biggest tasks categorized, it’s time to eliminate the unnecessary and unimportant tasks that are simply a waste of time. For many of us, this is checking social media, email, watching television, gossiping with friends, etc. After listing all of these tasks, try to experiment over the next five days without any of these, and see how much free time you have shaved off in your schedule.

For tasks that may seem urgent, but not important…

4. Delegate

It’s our nature to handle every single detail of our work (hello - control freak!), but they rarely lead to reaching our end goal faster. This can be potentially dangerous, especially when we’re focused on unimportant tasks that require a lot of our time. As Gary Vaynerchuk often states, “delegating is easy when you realize that 99% of what you do doesn’t matter.”

There are so many  virtual personal assistants at your fingertips on the internet, to help you accomplish the same tasks (without having to deal with extra grey hairs and stress headaches!). These tasks may include: travel research, flight booking, blog post updates, podcast editing, social media managing, contacting clients and more.

5. Optimize

Last, but not least, it’s time to optimize and refine your schedule to meet its full potential.

Here are the 3 ways to accomplish this:

i. Shorten your deadline for individual tasks

As stated by Parkinson’s Law, most of us take more time than necessary to complete a task. If we give ourselves three hours to complete a small task, we’ll do our very best to use up all those three hours to complete it. However, if we only gave ourselves 15 minutes, we’ll find a way to get it done. Ask yourself: how many of the tasks on your schedule actually take up the time you allocated to it? Can you do it sooner?

ii. Cut out your least important free time

While we need breaks during our day, some breaks such as spending time with family is more important than watching Game of Thrones on Netflix (i know - parting with regular re-runs of the bachelor pains me deeply!). Find one free time space in your schedule that is the least important, and cut it out from your schedule.

iii. Bundle your free times together

Or you can use my personal favorite option: bundling free time together. This means instead of having 2 slots of 30 minutes to check email or social media, you can simply use that first 30-minute slot to do both. Chances are, we already multi-task nearly everything we do anyways, so why not multi-task during our free times, rather than during our important tasks?

6. Become a morning person.

I get it - not everyone loves getting up at 5 or 6am to get some exercise, work, meditation, food prep or study in. But believe me - it takes two weeks to form a habit and pushing through that 'I can't get out of bed' mindset is a habit you will learn to love. It leaves you feeling a sense of accomplishment as you've ticked off a box before many people wake, it  means you have just added an extra hour to two to the day that you once 'really wanted one or two more hours in my day!', you get the see those amazing sunrises and feel a sense of clarity before the day begins - soon you'll be hanging for the hour you have by yourself to plan, clear your head and like me come up with your best ideas!

7. Make use of the times you feel most energized.

The times where you feel like you have the most energy will be different in each of us. Make a note of the times in the day where you feel most productive (for me, anything after 6pm is a struggle, but throw anything at me early in the morning!), and try to plan for the big, important tasks you have noted that need to be accomplished to be done during these times.

Obviously some of these aim towards the business minded reader, but give them a go and work them in to suit your life!