For the challenge in August. I want us to track our time. I don’t know how you have been lately, but I have been extremely busy (and tired) with work and I haven’t been as productive as I would like. Hence this post is a bit late and I am behind on reviews… Nevertheless I know my life is going to stay busy and will probably be getting even busier pretty soon. This is why for this month’s challenge I would like to work on making more productive use of my time.
I am going to start this off by just tracking what I am doing everyday. This should help us to see what we are spending all of our time doing. From there we can optimize, eliminate, or continue doing the things we spend our time on. I know for me I can get sucked into my phone sometimes when I stop to eat or use the restroom. I’m sure I spend much more time doing those activities than I need to be because of it. I would like to change this.
How to track your time
There are various ways to track your time. I would suggest either using a pen and paper or using the Toggl app to track your time. Pen and paper is probably the easiest, but you could cheat and might forget what you did during certain times. If you use the Toggl app it constantly records and you just tell it when to stop the timer and name the activity. This is handy for precise tracking and the app will even create a graph of your activities if you make sure to put each activity in a “project”. I often forget to stop the timer, but you can go back and manually correct the time.
That’s it track your time for one whole week, then next week I will tell you how to use that data!
How to optimize your time
Okay so I know tracking your time might have sucked. I did not enjoy it, but hopefully now you have a better idea of what you are spending your time on each day. With this information you can hopefully categorize what you are spending your time on and decide what needs to change.
So now you have 3 options. You can decide to, eliminate time wasters, optimize them, or to leave them as they are. I will help you decide which to do.
We are going to need to set priorities for how we spend our time. Some categories could be work, school, or sleep and these are harder to change so for the most part we should leave these alone. (Hopefully you are getting enough sleep though) There are 3 questions we should ask ourselves when deciding how to spend our time.
1. Is this something that I need to do?
If you are spending time on something that you need to do then it wouldn’t be considered a waste of time. Something you need to do could include activities such as: cooking, cleaning, brushing your teeth, showering, or working on homework. For the most part you can just leave these alone, but you can find ways to optimize.
2. Is this something that is important to/for me?
Activities that have personal importance or are seen as maintenance would fall in this category. In this category you would find: working out, meditating, reading, working for a charity, or even just relaxing. These should be prioritized, but are lower in priority than things you need to do.
3. Does this bring me enjoyment?
Lastly, you should prioritize things that bring you enjoyment. These go below needs and maintenance tasks, but are still of importance. If you don’t get time to do the things you enjoy, then you’re likely to be miserable and we wouldn’t want that!
So, for this week categorize your time and prioritize things in this order. If you are spending time on something that you answered no to for all 3 questions, then you should eliminate it and not waste your time on it anymore.
To give you an example I found that I spend of lot of time in between different tasks. I can get distracted and be on my phone for a long time and this really messes with my productivity throughout the day.
I also found that I spend almost an absurd amount of time on the habits I do each day. These include: meditation, yoga, journaling, affirmations, visualizations, reading, learning german, practicing piano, lifting weights, cardio, and stretching. Doing all of these habits or maintenance tasks takes me about 4 hours with the in between stuff. This is not feasible when I work (a job where I can’t multitask), go to school, and have other daily projects to take care of.
So I am going to try and create a quicker more streamlined set of habits to work on each day. I will separate these into must do and should do habits and schedule them into my days to see how everything will fit. These habits are important to me, but they are starting to get in the way of productivity when it comes to other more important side projects that I should be working on instead of doing yoga.
I hope you will do the same thing and find some activities to cut out each day.
You can see last month’s challenge here where I talk about how to control your temper.
How To Stay Cool: Don’t Lose Your Temper
What I have done to optimize my time
Time is the most precious resource we have as humans. We are born with only so much of it. It is not renewable. At some point we will run out of time. Everyone has (so far?)
This is why it is important to not waste our time! We must live our lives to the fullest and make the best use of this precious time we have.
One thing I have realized is that even when I become extremely busy with life with barely any downtime at all, that I don’t really miss giving up my leisure time. Not having 3 hours a night to watch tv or play video games doesn’t seem to make much of a difference in terms of my life satisfaction.
In fact, I am happier when I am spending more time each day doing the activities that I need to be doing. Getting stuff done!
I’m essentially nose to the grindstone now, in hopes that I can create a life where I can choose exactly how I want to spend all of my time.
I don’t want to suggest you get rid of all leisure time or rush around to do things faster all the time. As humans we live in a world with so many distractions and it is important to not get sucked into things that aren’t fulfilling for us.
As for changes I have made as part of this challenge I have:
- Deleted some social media apps and cut down on others
- Stopped sitting around on my phone doing nothing
- Optimized my schedule so I don’t have unnecessary breaks
- Given up some less necessary habits, which could be picked back up later when I have more time
- Found ways to accomplish two tasks at once e.g. listening to an audiobook while doing chores
- Replaced unnecessary leisure activities with more fruitful activities or sleep time