How to save various hours a day?

This is in reality a very good question that most of us ask ourselves every period of time, if not every week or every day. Years, months and days go by so quickly… Being busy has become a constant in our lives this century – everyone is spinning inside that mouse wheel, doing one thing or the other.

 In truth, the crudest reality and the only thing that we know for sure about life, is that it is a countdown period towards death. As much as I am serving you this reality in a cold perspective, that’s my purpose. I want you to get you worrying and wary of your time and to think on how you can free some of it for yourself, in your daily schedule.

People often ask me how can I produce so much, and do so much activities in my life. In this line, I will share my perspective on what I find to be the 14  top tips/techniques to help you save time in your personal life and work.

One of the speakers in personal development that helped me most in this area of time management skills was Brian Tracy. Looking for articles on the web to base my discussion, one that I found which was pretty good was by another Dave - Dave Ward. 

Now that we are in context, let’s go straight to the point and explore various core facts and techniques.

 I will spread my opinions in two areas:

A)    Personal life

B)    Work life

PART A – PERSONAL LIFE

 1.  Sleep well

I believe one of the main factors to succeed and for you to deliver your best everyday is to simply have a great sleep. Sleep is with no doubt, which is directly related to a balanced life.

 We don’t need mouse lab experiments for this one, we all experience it at some stage of our life. If you don’t rest well, you don’t think clearly, you make mistakes, you are less productive, you are irritable and create worse relationships with people, you may be driving to work and have a crash,…, the odds for things to go wrong are highly increased.

Good sleep is a pure basis of success, if you never noticed it.

 I can’t totally agree in Dave Ward’s statement about going to bed early and on his message here.

It’s common sense that the best time to sleep is at night, and I would not really recommend synthetic sleeping aids, for obvious reasons.

Leaving critics aside on harmful comments, I think the most important is to get sure that the right factors exist to allow your sleep: 

• Calm place to sleep:  You need a place with no or very little noise, perhaps a room that is very dark even when the morning comes. 
• Partners: If you sleep with a partner you need to assess if that person is also a factor in that quality of sleep. If they represent a problem, you may want to get a bigger bed, try to get yourself in a different position or even sleep in a separate bed. I am not trying to get you relationship problems, if you sleep well, surely you will be a better husband/wife. 
• Quality of the bed: With no doubts, a good mattress is one of the best investments you will ever make. 
• Stimulants: Avoid coffee and stimulants. Good food will also be reflected in the quality of your rest. Remember – you are what you eat.

  2. Cut down in surplus hobbies

Here’s a tricky one. You want to free your time so that you get more leisure periods – all those spare moments to expend on your hobbies, but you don’t want also to be stuck watching TV, big brother, reality shows, buffy the vampire slayer,…, there is so much ‘junk’ for the ignorant masses nowadays…

In this case I believe Dave Ward addresses well the problem, although this is something I don’t currently experience – I hardly watch commercial TV and have control over the information that is fed into my brain.

Looking deeper into this, also unnecessary web-browsing, videogames, magazines, and so on, can often become a problem and be addictive. How to tackle this? Without briefing you in detail about self-awareness techniques and Zen meditation, you need to see this traits arising and learn on how to build self-discipline, stop them and be balanced.

If you feel you do too much of a X hobbie, you know there is something there for you to cut down and you want to invest your time elsewhere. Be your own Budha! Spend your time in quality and meaningnful experiences.

 3.  Maximize the use of your time on any tasks and batch activities by type

I feel forced to comment on Dave Ward’s comment about lunch – if you have 1 hour to lunch, maybe think about it as lunch, rest and disconnect time and batch in that hour whatever you can do.

Lye in the grass, call a friend, play Nintendo DS, meet a friend. It is very important to try to batch similar tasks together for productivity and well-functioning.

PART B – WORK LIFE 

4. Commuting and transition time

Be efficient on your commuting time. Try to cut down as much as you can. If it takes you long to get to work, recycle that time and bring a laptop, work on some emails or tasks. If driving takes you longer than public transport, use public transport where if you manage to sit can be working on other personal or work items. If you cannot sit down use that time to read audio books and learn something.

 Treat every transition time as an opportunity to do something productive, sooner you start realizing this more productive you are and able to generate free time and achieve more with your life.

 5.     Work from home

If you have the choice, try to work from home a few days a week. More and more this option is being made available to workers in capitals. I found  this recent article which provides a good overview of the 4.6 million hours that can be recycled just in UK by allowing employees to work from home. The adjustment can be difficult at start but soon you realize that apart from staff being able to produce more, they also gain all that extra time and energy that is spent getting ready and travelling to work, in work activities and deliverables.

 6.     Emails

Any office worker understands how much time he spends dealing with mails, therefore being one of our major daily tasks, this is with no doubt something else to focus on. 

My views, and thinking about my daily activity, is that we should check email every 2 hours. You should obviously adjust this practice to the context of your jobs, since for some positions it could be difficult to achieve, but let’s not forget that telephone is also available and is should be used for urgent maters. 

Checking your email only a few times a day, will also help you be more efficient, as you don’t spend all that time and mental power of switching from one task to read an email that just arrived, then getting back to the task, thinking on the background on how to respond or handle a query (especially for those difficult ones). Also there is certain percentage of emails that get auto by the own clients who have originally escalated them. 

• Spam – kill it from start. 
• Set email rules, so you don’t have to those frequent unnecessary emails, or so that you can focus on reading them at a dedicated slot during your week.
•  Cultivate a low information diet and focus on what’s important in your competencies.

 7.     Think on paper, plan and prioritize

think and plan

Plan on paper and have a to-do list always ready- that helps you being focused and avoids procrastination. I usually start my day by spending 5-15 minutes planning, ‘re-contextualizing’ and looking at all my weekly/daily tasks and prioritizing by importance – that keeps me focused and productive.

 I always start with the difficult tasks first, or the ones that require my brain at his best. I get two main things out of this:

• hard/important tasks get done faster;
• and feeling of achievement within the day;

In the afternoons I spend more time in all those tasks that require less brain power, or all the little ‘bits and bops’, that would have easily distracted from my main morning priorities. 

8.     Plan your day considering your energy levels/mood for certain tasks

We are human, sometimes we are tired, other times we are full of energy, somedays we want to do one activity, others we prefer to be doing something else.

This goes inline with the previous point and also does varies from person to person. It is important to understand the times of the day you have more energy, or when you are more efficient at X task. There are also days, you prefer not to have client calls and others you are in a very exciting and ‘talking mood’.  It is no point to do difficult tasks if you don’t feel you have the energy or the right mood for the activities (unless they are crucial).  

 9.     Take every opportunity to maximize your time 

This is one you can only answer yourself. Get used to meditate on how you can maximize your time and productivity.

To give you a personal example, I don’t currently spend much time reading books. I feel it is a waste of time. Instead I listen to audio books, they are today widely available, they develop greatly your auditory skills, and I learn far much faster. I do listen to audio books mostly when I am running at the gym, doing house tyding, taking the dog for a walk,…, so I continuously investing on that time when my brain is in ‘stand by’ mode.

At work, I usually start one hour earlier. That extra one or two hours you are not interrupted, fresh and focused becomes excellent for productivity – you will produce the equivalent to 2 or more hours… In addition, if you have to commute to work and can manage to start/leave work early, that will also represent  that you will often be able to drive home faster, or get home faster via public transport.

10.  Develop a sense of urgency

Have the urge to produce deliverables fast.

It’s a practice we can implement straight away, and we will find that in a very few weeks we will see results if we get used to perform faster. When you develop the sense of urgency you will quickly be ahead of the masses and stand out at work. The downfall is that in my case, I see more work and responsibility coming my way, but it is ultimately up to you regulate if the situation becomes not beneficial for you at work.

 11.  Break large tasks into subtasks

When you have a major task, break it in pieces and understand the difficulty of each so that you can understand and plan when it is the most efficient time to deal with them.

This also helps to work on that motivation and self-esteem level from achieving steady progress.

12.  Once you start a task, don’t stop and motivate yourself into action and be positive

Long subtitle, hey? I think these all marry very well together. Be positive, action and deliverable driven –  life and work is all about achievement and output. When you start a task, simply get used to finish it and bear in mind the final deliverable. The masses usually run out of steam and procrastinate on tasks, and the successful people don’t.

 13.  Work in batch mode

This goes also inline with some of the points above.

Develop blocks of time (e.g. 90-200 minutes) where you can work on a task or group of tasks uninterrupted.

As an example, I tend to plan all my client and training calls in one morning/afternoon, so calls don’t go beyond schedule (since I have to start other call at X time), and I only spend my time and energy on a task, and get on the right frame of mind for it since I create the expectation/slot for it before hand.

On the other hand, when I have to work on creating a document, I try to avoid being interrupted, away from the telephone, and focused on the analysis and editing.

It’s no point to start a document, if you don’t feel the energy there – the work you will be doing in those 3 or 4 hours, can be achieved in only 1 hour when the right energy or mood for X activity is there. When we analyse the ROTI (return on time invested) these sort of conclusions become very transparent.

 14.  Control interruptions

This is also related to the previous topic.Think about:

• Setting time limits in calls/meetings;
• Develop techniques to minimize interruptions. You can for instance establish a protocol at the start of a meeting (establish a time constraint, when questions must be raised, etc), develop skills on dominating/controlling presentations;
• Control telephone calls. You can even establish that you are only available at X times, if telephone is a time waster for you;

Ok, this has already been a pretty long post, so I will let you digest.

It’s also important that you don’t get lost and too analytical in the process (I used to do it often) and remember that perfection is utopia and that the purpose of time management, in my humble view, is to increase your quality of life.

Acceleration at many levels can be a consequence, with its own benefits and downfalls, but that’s a total different subject and something to talk about in other post(s).

David