More time for the things you love

How to have more time for the things you love

In life, there are three things we can invest: time, money and energy. And today I want to share you my thoughts about how we can have more time to do the things we love.

The big issue with time is that it is limited. Everyone on this planet has the same 24 hours. And depending on how you use this 24 hours, it can decide whether you’ll be successful or not.

Here are some tips that helped me to get more time to do sports, meeting friends or just relaxing in front of the tv 🙂

Work more efficient

This can be very interesting especially for college students. Because now you are at a point where you can schedule your time as you want. If you can do your tasks in one hour instead of two hours you have one hour which you can use for anything.

This is not the case if you have a 9-5 job and you can leave work at five o’clock independent of open or closed tasks.

But how could you work faster and better at the same time? Here I have some tips, that could help you.

Focus is one of the most important aspects of working efficiently. It is important that you focus on only one thing at the time. I made the experience that multi-tasking is slower than working on only one task. Because every time you switch between two tasks you need some time to rethink what exactly you have to do.

And there you are losing time and energy. So focus on only one task at the time. And also shut down every possible distraction. Silent your phone and close your mail application. Also, disable notifications on your laptop and close facebook while working.

In addition, you should try to optimize your processes every time. Maybe you need to read some books about speed reading or working more efficient. Try to improve yourself step by step. You don’t need to be perfect at this moment but if you keep improving you will be one day better than most of the people.

Use waiting time better

I don’t know how you feel, but for me, there are many times in life I need to wait for something or someone. That may be waiting at the doctor or waiting for a friend who is always late. Or maybe you need to take the bus or the car to get to college, work or whatever.

And I always hated waiting. Standing or sitting there doing nothing until something happens. That doesn’t sound very exciting. So I was thinking about how I can use this times better. And I found several different ways on how to use this time better.

I don’t know how you are learning, but I tend to write all the thinks I need to remember on index cards. There are also apps if you are more into technology. However, what I wanted to say is that it is easy to use two minutes waiting time for learning your index cards.

Guess what, if you use your waiting time for learning you are learning more without doing more! Let’s say you used your index cards in your waiting time and you have been able to work with them for 20 minutes in one week. That’s 20 minutes you have been learning without sitting down and motivating yourself.

You can also use this time to read papers you need to read or check your mail. Just try to use your waiting time more efficient and you will gain a lot of more spare time.

Plan Better

Good planning can save you a lot of time. Yes, planning also takes time but it is worth the effort. I heard that every minute planning can save up to 10 minutes of work. This is of course not always true but it shows the possibility.

But what makes planning so efficient? At first, you have to take bigger tasks and split them into smaller tasks. These smaller tasks must be so small that they can be done in less of 2 hours. If that is not the case make them smaller.

By writing down all the tasks you get an overview how much you have to do. Now you can assign tasks for every day. You shouldn’t assign to many tasks, that could demotivate you.

The next step is that you need to follow your plan. Work every day on your tasks and go to bed when you are finished. When you checked off all the completed tasks you can feel very proud!

Making a plan has the advantage that you always know what you have to do. Also, you can always watch your progress while working on your plan. It also gives you the opportunity to control your processes and try to improve them.

In addition, you know exactly when you have done all your tasks and you can enjoy the rest of the day, knowing that there are no tasks left.

At the beginning, you may have the problem of planning too much or too little. And that’s perfectly fine. Improve your planning from week to ween and you will get better every time. Also, you can plan yourself rest days where you can enjoy your life without having any tasks. This can often be very useful.

Prioritize

You always need to prioritize your tasks. Work on your most important tasks at first. When you are finished you can work on your less important tasks. In addition, you can also delegate smaller tasks.

This may be not an option for college students but this can be very helpful later. There will be always a lot of tasks you need to do and when you want to enjoy some spare time you have two possibilities: a) don’t do all of them or b) delegate tasks.

You can delegate tasks like cleaning, cooking, buying groceries, gardening and much more. To decide whether I want to outsource something or not I do the following: At first, I calculate my price/hour. This can be the price you actually earn or the price you think you are worth. For example, my price is $15/hour. Now I have a look at the costs and the effort the task. For example, groceries shopping costs me about half an hour.

Now I have a look at the costs and the effort the task. As an example groceries shopping costs me about half an hour. $15/hour * 1/2 hour =

$15/hour * 1/2 hour = $7.5

The boy who can buy me my groceries wants to have $5 so that is less than I would pay for myself. So for me, this deal is worth it, because I would make more money working than shopping groceries.

I hope you can see my point here! Of course, you can’t outsource everything but the more you can, the more spare time you will have.

As you can see there are many different possibilities to get more spare time. And isn’t that what we all want? Because our time is limited so we need to try to make the most out of it.

Do you have any other ideas? Or did these ideas help you? Just leave a comment below 🙂

I wish you all the best!

Fabi