How To Find Time To Get More Things Done

A lot of the complaints I hear with mastermind groups or friends or anyone who’s interested in being more productive or getting more done pretty much revolves around how to find more time in the day. I don’t normally talk too much about anything that I do because one, I think it’s completely and utterly boring to other people and I usually do a litmus test with my wife. If she glazes over from the beginning, then probably not too many other people are interested. If you are interested in those details, then I have websites that I share a little bit more detail in.

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Point being – finding more time. It pretty much revolves around awareness, at the beginning anyway. Until you have a clear understanding of exactly where your time is going, and I mean down to like 15 minute chunks, then you’re pretty much going to be SOL on figuring out how to find more of it and how to make better use of it.

Everyone’s least favorite exercise, from anyone I’ve ever talked to, and I don’t think anyone actually ever does it except the go-getters that are already figuring out the path, is to actually track your time. If every 15 minute block sounds like too much for you, then do it in hours. It needs to be specific.

Just open up the spreadsheet and have Monday through Sunday on it and have your wake up time, your go to sleep time and portion it out into 15 minute chunks. There are templates on the internet that can help. Open up Excel, hit 7, 7:15, 7:30, 7:45 and then I think you can highlight them and drag them down and Excel will fill in the rest for you. Then just go along and with one, two, maybe three words, describe what you were doing. If you were working on a project, put “work project.” If you were watching TV, put “watching TV.” If you were on Facebook, put “Facebook.” This is to help you see patterns. That’s what you want to see.

After you’ve done this for, I would say at least a week, three weeks is really optimal because that’s a good chunk of time where you get the outlier days and weeks out of there and you get three weeks of good data and you can see habits at that point. You can see, “Hey, I spent X number of hours on TV, facebook, playing games, doing other things that are not aligned with my goals.” It becomes completely obvious and that creates at least two wonderful things in your life. One is the awareness of your entire schedule and where the time goes. Two is where you can cut back and start putting in the stuff that you really want.

It really is that simple. You have to go on the hunt, find it and then ruthlessly chop out the stuff that’s sucking your life away so that you can come in and plant the seeds that you want to see grow. I know I’m making it sound easy. It does require quite a bit of work, but like all good things in life, it’s going to take a little bit of work to get there. Do it and you will find it enlightening, and you may find a couple of surprises here and there. Find more time, do more stuff and start living the life that you were given. Your time is limited and it could be helpful to think of it that way.