Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Time Management Tools: Create More Free Time Using Two Simple Tips

By Lachlan Haynes


Your time is by far your most important resource. Why? Well it's the only thing you can't get more of. Think about it. No matter what you do you can never ever get more time. Can you?

Worse still, we don't even know how much time we have to spend! We have no idea if we have 60 years left to spend or 60 seconds left to spend. And yet humans spend it without a second thought. Humans spend it like it's going out of fashion. Don't we? Don't we spend hours every day surfing the web or trolling through Facebook or other social sites for no particular reason? Don't we watch hours of TV often without even knowing why we're watching it? Don't we often have to try to think of things to do so we can "fill" time?

Can this be right? Do humans really just spend their lives filling time in the belief that time will never end? How can this happen? Well it's simple - for some reason we just think life will go on forever. We just think time is basically endless. We think that there is plenty of time to do whatever we want to do. Every day we wake up and there's more time right in front of us. Another 16 hours of time before bed! The problem of course is that this is a completely flawed belief. The only time you really have is right now.

The real question is what are you doing with your time? Are you working towards something special? Are you filling your time with things you love? Or are you wasting your most precious resource? Whittling it away day after day with empty pursuits that don't really take you anywhere? The bad news is no one can create more time. I don't care what you do, you can't create time. You can however save time, and if you save time you can have more free time.

We all love free time don't we? Free time is time free of any outside obligation. It's all yours to do with as you please. Ideally, your entire day (every day) would be free time. That would be time nirvana! But that's a discussion for another day. You want more free time so that you can spend more time doing whatever you want to do (like play video games or sit on the internet for 6 hours straight for no reason). So let's look at two simple strategies that you can use straight away to create more free time.

Number one: Add lots of short breaks into your study schedule. Four 15-minute breaks each night is one hour of free time. If you do that from Monday to Friday that's five extra hours of free time this week! If you don't take breaks regularly your mind will wander anyway and you will be in a "junk time" phase - where no work is being completed but you are still "studying". If you feel like you've lost focus always take a break.

Number two: Identify your "dead time" and start putting it to good use. What's dead time you may ask? Why it's the time of the day when you don't have free time but you're also not being productive (like studying or working). For example, you may be waiting at a bus stop for the bus to come, or be sitting on the bus, or be walking to school or work, or be sitting in a car, or you might even be walking the dog. This is time that is hardly ever used - so get ahead by using it.

There are plenty of things that can be done during this time. Listen to a recording you made of some information you need to memorize. Practice a speech or pitch you're working on. Look over some flash cards. Do some reading. Watch a video on your phone (hopefully something that actually advances your current life goal - not just funny cute cat videos). This is time that you can use to get ahead. If you do 20 minutes of work on the bus on the way home then that's 20 minutes less you have to do when you get home. If you do that every day for five days a week that will be 100 minutes ahead each week. If you do that every week you will be 5200 minutes ahead (which is 86.67 hours in case you were wondering).

I truly hope that after having read this you understand how valuable your time is. You can never get more time. Every minute should be precious to you. You can do great things with your time. It's all you really have. So starting saving as much time as you can each and every day in order to free up as much time as possible. It makes sense doesn't it? Don't wait until you're 60 years old - do it today! Spend your time doing what you love to do. What else really matters anyway? Good luck!




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