Right now, your job takes up the vast majority of your free time. You probably spend 8 hours a day at work and at least 1 hour a day commuting. Sometimes you’ll clock out late (most times in fact) and then there’s the time you spend getting your lunch and clothes ready for work. In short, you don’t really spend 8 hours a day at work… you spend 10 hours at least. You spend 8 hours sleeping too, so that means you have 6 hours max to yourself.
Lifestyle design is a concept that has been popularized recently by Tim Ferriss and his book The 4 Hour Workweek. The idea is that you’re going to design your lifestyle to be just the way you want it and you are going to make your work fit in around that. This is instead of going the opposite tact of choosing your job and then changing your lifestyle to fit that.
Really this should be the obvious and ‘default’ way to proceed. Why compromise your lifestyle just so that you can work more hours and satisfy an organization? It doesn’t seem to make any sense!
Of course there are many more ways you can save time and buy back minutes and hours of your life to spend doing things you love!
The aim of this book has been to help you to understand the principles of saving time – as well as to understand why saving time is so important and so useful. You can then apply those principles yourself to get the desired effects.
But likewise, let’s finish up by looking at a few more strategies you can use to save a little more time…
Learning is one of the very best ways to use your time and many of us state that the reason we want more time is so that we can learn a particular topic or a language.
But a lot of us just don’t know how to go about learning things efficiently and thus this ends up taking more time than we think it will too.
In short: you probably already have the time you need to learn German or electronic engineering – you’re just putting it off.
Here’s how to get started…
So now you’ve started to free back a ton of time using lots of different strategies and tips. The next question is what you’re going to do with all this new time that you’ve earned yourself.
Because if you’re just going to spend all of it lying in front of the television then you really may as well be working or spending time tidying up in the kitchen!
So how do you start filling your time with worthwhile and exciting activities? How do you create that rich tapestry of memories that reflects a full and long life?
Another tip is to consider multitasking in order to get more done. There are some situations where this isn’t a good idea – but in the right scenario it can help you to save a ton of time. For example, if you are walking somewhere to visit a friend, why not call them on your phone’s hands-free kit as you head there in order to get more than one thing done at once?
Likewise you can chat to someone while you’re washing the dishes and you can work on your novel while commuting home on the train. That latter option is actually a very good use of your time as the commute for some people can sap 1-2 hours of their life! If you’re currently just using it to sit and stare forward that’s a huge waste! You could be reading, learning a new skill or starting a business on your laptop.
