Here is a list of 10 things I do to make more time during the day. Some of these things are no-brainers while others are more suited for me and may not necessarily work for you.
Here they are in no particular order:
1) Eat Dinner Early
My wife and I get home from work at around 4:30PM. By 5:30PM, we've already finished cooking, eating, and cleaning up.So how does this help with time? Well if we go to bed at 10:30 PM, that gives us block of 5 whole hours to do whatever we please. Five hours is plenty of time to work on whatever projects you need to work on or to blaze through a number of things on your to-do list.
Had we scheduled dinner at 7:00PM, we wouldn't have that same freedom to schedule our time to do what we need to do. In other words, we end up having to work a schedule around dinner. You might be too tired as soon as you get back from work to do anything significant before dinner and after dinner, you may feel more drowsy after the meal and would probably be more inclined to relax.
Of course, having an early dinner will mean you'd feel a little hungry later on in the evening, but some light healthy snacks usually holds us over.
2) Waking Up Early
I usually wake up at around 5:45AM every morning. I don't have to leave to go to work until 8:30AM. That gives me 2 hours and 45 minutes to get whatever I have to do to prepare for the coming day.If you added up the big block of time from the previous day with the block of time in the morning, you've practically got yourself a full day's worth of working hours!
I can tell you from experience that you can definitely get a lot done in that time. Over the course of a week, you've got yourself more or less the same amount of time you do working full-time.
3) Do Chores While We Sleep....Or While We Work
There are certain chores that take a long time to do and instead of waiting for them to complete, why not do them overnight?I'm talking about things like laundry or running the dishwasher. You can set these before you go to bed and when you wake up, it's all done. Likewise we can do these kinds of chores while we are at work and when we come back, it's all ready to be put away.
What I usually like to do is to "clump" all these types of chores together - that way, I can get them all done in one pass and I won't have to break-up my other, larger "chunks" of time for these tasks.
4) Book Classes/Appointments For The First Thing In Morning
Anytime we have appointments or classes on the weekend, we've always booked them for the first thing in the morning. That way, you are not planning your day around your appointment but instead you are efficiently setting your day up.Imagine you've booked an appointment for 2:00PM on a weekend. On that particular day, you now have to start thinking about: should you have lunch at home or go out, should you run some of your chores before or after the appointment, you can't go catch a matinee after the appointment because it'll be too late and you don't know what to do for dinner, if you have dinner at home then should you go home and prepare,etc, etc, etc.
Guess what - now you've got yourself planning your day around your appointment.
Get that appointment or class out of the way as early as you can in the day. You can then have the freedom to do whatever you wish and it will feel as though you still have the entire day to yourself.
5) Breakup Larger Tasks Into Smaller, Manageable Chunks
Whenever I'm confronted with something that will require a large amount of time that I cannot seem to fit into my schedule conveniently, I'll break it up into smaller chunks and do it over the course of several days.An example for me is exercise. During the weekdays, I cannot conveniently fit a big block of time dedicated to exercise. If I do it on any one morning, I'll be straining for time to get my other tasks done. I cannot do it immediately after work (I'm cooking and eating dinner), and I dare not exercise too close to my usual bedtime.
So what do I do?
I do intense, concentrated exercises on two or three muscle groups everyday for 20 minutes in the morning, six days a week. That's it! I can easily spare 20 minutes in the morning, every morning for six days, which adds up to a 2-hour workout every week.
Doing this also saves me a whole morning (or afternoon) on the weekends since I no longer have to dedicate a whole 2-hour block of time exercising.
6) Bunch Small Tasks Together & Get Them Done In One Sitting
I have a bunch of smaller tasks that I usually to do all together in the morning. I like to bunch these tasks all together so that I can get them out of the way and I don't have to think about when to do them later on.I also try to do them all back-to-back so that I make maximum use of my time and when I'm about ready to leave the house for work, it'll feel as though I have already accomplished so much and the day hasn't even started!
A brief list of small tasks I do in the morning are: check email, check overnight market news, do my visualizations, do all necessary prep work for the trading day, exercise, check of various blogs, and so on and so on.
7) Do Grocery Shopping During Weeknights
This tip is one of those things where you think to yourself "Why aren't more people doing this?". I can understand that maybe people don't have time or they are too tired after work, but with this list of 10 things, I personally find plenty of time to do it (not that it takes a lot of time).In the past when we did our grocery shopping on weekends, we had to contend with lots of traffic, a full parking lot, crowded grocery aisles, on-sale items out of stock and long check-out lines. Then we'd go another specialty grocery store to pick up a few extra items and we'd have to contend with the same things there too.
Since then, we've changed and we now like to go grocery shopping on either Tuesday or Wednesday nights, usually around 7:00PM when all rush hour traffic is gone. Why?
Well, we get our pick of parking spots, the aisles in the grocery store are near empty, everything is fully stocked, and no lines at the check-out counter. Then we can zoom over to the specialty store and pickup whatever else we need.
By doing this, I'd say we cut our grocery shopping time by almost 1/2. What used to take a whole morning or afternoon now only takes us an hour to do.
8) Do All Prep Work The Night Before
Whatever prep work we can do for the next day, we'll try to do it the night before.The main thing that we do the night before is to prepare everything we are going to have for the following evenings' dinner. This include cutting up the veggies, prepping any meats, and sorting out which ingredients will be cooked together.
How it works in our household is as follows - my wife preps all the ingredients the night before and separates them into the various dishes that we'll be having.
The following day as soon as I get home from work, all I have to do is open the fridge and cook them according to how they are separated. No prep work is needed on my part and 15 minutes later, dinner's ready when my wife gets home (which is usually shortly after I get home).
9) Just Grab A Cup Of Coffee And Get Off The Couch
My problem is that immediately after dinner, I have the need to just sit down for a few minutes to let my dinner settle, which then leads to drowsiness, which then makes me want to just be a couch potato (this is especially true if I've had a really heavy dinner).My wife doesn't seem to have this problem, but for me, that sloth-like feeling after dinner not only affects my productivity, but it also eats up a lot of time.
What I do now is the following: since we finish dinner at around 5:30PM, if I'm unable to get myself out of that "sloth-like" state by 6:00PM, then I'll get up off the couch and get a cup of coffee.
Obviously this isn't going to help everyone out there, but for me, this works wonders. All I just need is something to kick start me up and if I cannot do this under my own power, then coffee always does the trick.
If I don't grab that cup of coffee and get up off the couch, I end up spending the entire evening watching mindless TV shows (I've been guilty of doing this a few times).
10) Learn To Speed Read
Do you know how many RSS feeds I have in my newsreader? As of today, I have 383 feeds.You may be thinking "That's absurd" or "What the...". Or you may know someone with more.
Obviously some of the blogs I have in there are no longer working, but I can tell you that on a typical day, there will be over 1000 new posts from the various feeds that I look at.
Since my interests are so varied, I have many types of feeds in my newsreader - trading, self improvement, luxury, travel, real estate, blogging, technology, health, and news are just some of the varying topics.
Part of it is that I do selective reading and the other part is that I actively try to speed read most of the posts. I cannot afford the time to read every single new post on a daily basis, but learning to speed read has definitely been a time saver.
As you can also see, I'm also an avid reader of books (our library no longer has room for all the new books that keep coming in - until we move to a new house, all new books end up in boxes or on the floor) and the only thing that allows me to read as many books as I do is by speed reading.
There you have it - 10 things I do to make more time during my busy day!
