Getting Your Time (Life) Back
When you get your time back you get your life back.
Of course with the responsibilities of kids, businesses, families and similar, it is likely you may only be able to scrape together small pockets of time at first… but this is what to do with those pockets to get more time back:
- Keep a time diary and find out where your time goes! Three days of a time diary is usually enough but a week will enlighten you. Don’t just ‘notice’ where it goes, write it down. Record anything that takes 3 minutes or more. Eg: Kids lunches – 20min. Call from Mum – 7min. Check emails – 3min. Scroll Facebook – 12min.
- Anything you repeat can be delegated, outsourced or streamlined. So in the moments of free time you get, even if only for a few minutes, teach these activities to someone so that you wont have to do them to the same extent later.
o Teach your kids how to do some of the things you do for them
o Show a staff member how you handle a situation that comes up regularly
o Hire someone to mow the lawns, iron, vacuum or book flights the way you would do them.
o Create several online shopping lists and just order the relevant order each week rather than heading to the shops and rethinking each week.
(I know your brain will argue with a few of these ideas, quickly seeing the obstacles. But you’re a smart person; you can work out the detail. Just keep focused on getting your life back.)
- Add financial value to others. If you don’t make enough money to pay someone to do tasks, then in any free moments you get you must research and explore how you can make your employer our your clients more money; that way they can pay you more.
- What you do not empower, will overpower you.
That issue that you keep ignoring, hoping it will go away or hoping someone else will do… it is your time killer. Unless you deal with it, manage it and monitor it, you will never be free. You can’t outsource your problems, only the things you repeat. So own the problem and lead the solution.
- If you do get more time, know what you will do with it. Too often when people do get free time they rest. There is a time for rest but unless you have a book you want to read, something you want to make or exercise you want to do, you will just fill time with ‘busy’ work, while you vent that you have no time. If you don’t have a passion more compelling than the tasks that seem to keep filling your time, they will always fill your time.
- Promise less to people. When you over promise you let people down. Listen to the words that come out of your mouth and notice if you are just trying to please people, knowing that you will disappoint them later. People don’t want to be lied to. Tell the truth and it will free your mind and your time.
- Give your weeks, months and years, themes. You wont be able to get every thing perfect in a month, but you can get one part cranking so that it requires less work later. Move away from a to-do list and move toward themes.
- Nothing happens without a deadline. Put your passions and interests into your calendar so that have time allocated to them in advance and a dead line to have them done by.
And lastly, the battle to own our time is never over. ‘Busy-ness’ is like weeds in the garden, they only disappear when you garden.
Link: Blog – ‘Have I achieved anything in my life at all?’
Link: Blog – ‘Overwhelm and Flustered’
Link: Blog – ‘Your Diary Is Your Life’s Mirror’