And that doesn’t just mean prioritizing your health over spending more time at work. It doesn’t just mean prioritizing certain people in your life because you don’t have time to make everyone happy.
What it really means is understanding that your time is your most valuable asset – and that this should always be your focus and your priority. Don’t allow yourself to waste your years working and don’t focus too much on making money.
Look for a job and a lifestyle that leaves you with more time to do the things you love and you’ll be happy – regardless of financial or material gain. This is the big secret to life and now you know how to make it work for you!
Time Management – Check List
If you’ve read the full Getting Back Time ebook, then you should now have a full understanding of how to save time in your personal life and how to give yourself more freedom to work on the projects you’re passionate about.
It’s not just about finding little time saving hacks: it’s about changing your priorities and redesigning your lifestyle around what matters to you.
It’s a lot to take on board though and you might need some extra guidance. Read on then to see a checklist and a series of steps you can follow to start getting your time back and to start living the life that you want to live:
Prioritize
Step one is to prioritize. This is important as you need to know what it is you want to do with your time if you’re going to find more time to do it. Otherwise, life has a way to fill up and take up your time.
- Stop defining your success by work
- Think about what you actually want to do with your life
- What does happiness look like to you?
- What steps could you take to get closer to that reality right now?
You likely don’t need more money to make certain dreams a reality. You could have a nicer house, travel more or spend more time with family on your current budget. The challenge is time.
Cut back on work
Knowing this, you need to start thinking about ‘lifestyle design’. Instead of finding ways to fit your routine in around your work, find ways to work that allow you to live the life you want. It’s a subtle difference that has a huge impact.
- Ask for flexi-time
- Ask about working from home
- Look at other jobs with flexi time
- Look at other jobs that would have less commute
- Consider working online and becoming a digital nomad!
- At the same time:
- Find ways to accumulate more wealth without working more
- Take up a side project
- Start a small business
- Cut back on expenses
Increase your energy levels
Even if you save an hour in the evening, you might not be able to do much with it if you’re too tired. Thus you need to increase your energy at the same time as your time. You can do this a few ways:
- Exercising to improve energy efficiency
- Use HIIT training in order to increase mitochondrial quantity and efficiency
- Use 10 minute workouts
- Find ways to exercise throughout the day
- Consider a fitness tracker
- Getting better nutrition
- Getting better sleep
- Get a daylight lamp
- Go to bed at a set time
- Make sure your room is dark and quiet
- Have a shower before bed
- Try to avoid stress which consumes energy
Outsource boring tasks
Spend less time on boring tasks by outsourcing them. Consider:
- Hiring a cleaner
- Getting your children to handle some cleaning jobs
- Asking for help from friends
- Sharing jobs with kids
- Getting meals delivered to your home
- Using a virtual assistant
- 5 Automate and Optimize
Likewise you can automate and optimize some tasks. That means you could:
- Use a slow cooker to prepare some meals
- Use a food processor
- Use a dishwasher
- Set up other standing orders for deliveries (food shopping)
- Get a robotic vacuum cleaner
Multitask
Find ways to get more value out of your time by talking on the phone while you wash up, by doing things with friends so you get social benefit as well and by starting projects or entertaining yourself on your commute. Want to learn German? Do it on the bus to work every morning!
Make appointments and prioritize
Ultimately a lot of this comes down to prioritizing. If you want to do something specific, then probably that means something else has to go. Learn to say no to invitations to go out and learn to quit things that you aren’t getting anything out of. There’s nothing wrong with being a quitter!
Instead, prioritize the things that matter most to you and then commit yourself to them. That maybe means booking an hour every evening to spend on that thing – in which case you treat that appointment as unbreakable like any other appointment you would make with a friend!
Time Management – Mind Map
Time Management – Resources
This resource sheet is going to take a slightly different format from many of the resource sheets you may have encountered in the past. Rather than simply listing lots of different tools, books, articles and websites, this sheet will count down some of the very most powerful and effective time-saving strategies there are. Some of these will involve tools which we will link to.
Take a look at this list and see which elements you can incorporate into your own lifestyle to save a lot of time.
Learn Speed Reading
Learning to speed read is a great way to save yourself a lot of time whether you’re reading necessary texts like instructions or stories and books.
Spreeder is one tool that can help you do this. You can find this here: http://www.spreeder.com/
Have Food Delivered
I’m not about to tell you to start eating takeaway every night as that would ruin your health. But I am telling you to outsource certain tasks you don’t enjoy. If cooking is one of them, then use a service to get healthy meals delivered.
Balance Box is one of the most popular services of this kind and will have meals delivered to your door with set calories and other requirements: http://www.balancebox.com/Slimmers/
Use a Fitness Tracker
Your energy levels are crucial to time management. If you have no energy, then you will have no ability to use the time you win back.
Using a fitness tracker, you can monitor how active you are during the day which is a much more natural and healthy way to increase your energy levels (versus doing one intense workout in the evening). The Microsoft Band 2 is a great fitness tracker that monitors your steps, heartrate and even your sleep! Find it here: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msuk/en_GB/cat/Microsoft-Band/
Get a Daylight Lamp
Speaking of sleep, this is generally something very important that will help you to have more energy throughout the day.
One of the very best ways to improve your sleep and thus have more energy and more time is to get a Lumie alarm clock. These use a light that is more similar to the lightwaves of the sun and that comes on slowly in order to gradually wake you out of a deep sleep and ensure the room is light once you get up. You can find these here: http://www.lumie.com/collections/light-therapy-waking
Read All of Tim Ferriss
If there’s one person who is very influential in the field of saving time, then it’s Tim Ferriss.
Tim Ferriss’ first book was called The Four Hour Workweek. This book dealt with how you could spend less time at work and design a lifestyle you wanted. It is essentially the first and most influential book on lifestyle design and it is an absolute masterpiece.
He followed this with a book called The Four Hour Body. This is a book all about how to work out quickly and get into shape using just a little exercise every week. He discusses the ‘MED’ or ‘Minimum Effective Dose’ essentially stating that beyond a certain point, there is no benefit to putting in more time down the gym.
Finally, his last book The Four Hour Chef explains how to quickly learn cooking. More than that though, it discusses how to learn more quickly using the ‘DiSSS’ method.
You can see all of Tim Ferriss’ books here: http://fourhourworkweek.com/books/
You can also read a lot of information from Tim for free here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/
And if you’re interested in learning more about DiSSS, then you can find that here: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2013/05/20/accelerated-learning-techniques/
How to Save an Hour a Day
Another of the best books on this subject is How to Save an Hour a Day by Michael Heppell. This is essentially just a huge collection of different tips, strategies and methods for saving time all collected in one place.
Find out more about Michael, his tips and his books at the website: http://www.michaelheppell.com/
Get a Hands-Free Kit
A hands-free kit is your ultimate tool for multitasking which in turn allows you to get more done. There are plenty of hands-free kits available on Amazon, any of which will do the same job. Now you can call friends while walking to work, while going to the gym or while picking up milk.
And a Slow Cooker
Slow cookers can be instrumental in helping you spend less time in the kitchen. Prepare food the night before or in the morning, put in the cooker and it will be ready and cooked for you when you come in through the door. You can find one here
Find a Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants will do any job for you that can be carried out online and with no specialist experience. That’s a ton of different jobs you can outsource and forget about! You can find one at www.smart-pa.com
Email Game
‘The Email Game’ turns checking your email into a game. The tag line is ‘Email Management Made Fun’. Whether that’s true or not is debatable but it can certainly save you time and reduce the amount you check your messages: http://emailga.me/
The Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is an approach to productivity that breaks your work up into smaller chunks. This is supposed to make us much more productive and avoid distractions. You can find advice on how to use it and a free timer here: http://pomodorotechnique.com/get-started/
Tabata Protocol
The tabata protocol is like the Pomodoro technique of exercise. This breaks your training into periods of intense exertion and periods of rest. This allows you to train more efficiently in shorter time and also increases your mitochondria for enhanced energy. Find a tool you can use here: http://www.tabataprotocol.com/
IFTTT
IFTTT allows you to set up interactions between many of your online services and accounts – even your hardware! Uploading photos to Facebook manually is a thing of the past. Go to: www.ifttt.com
Become a Digital Nomad
Want to take this to its ultimate conclusion? Then become a digital nomad. Not sure how to go about getting started? Getting a job would be a good place to begin. You can do that here: http://www.digitalnomadjobs.com/
