Time is the great equalizer of life. Everyone has the same amount of time. You have 24 hours in a day, the same way the most successful person you know has 24 hours a day.
But the key thing here is to be able to maximize the available time you have.
Are you so busy that you wish you have more time in a day so you can get more things done?
Here is a simple technique that you can use immediately to help you get more things done given that you still have the same amount of hours in a day.
You have a scheduled meeting at 2 – 3 pm. You also have another meeting at 3 – 4 pm. Your first meeting ends at 2:50 pm. You check your phone and look at social media sites. Cool.
It’s now 3 pm and your next meeting starts. It ends at 3:55pm. You “relax” and look at online stores to browse for the next thing you want to purchase. You continue your work again at 4pm.
Is this scenario something relatable or similar to your experience?
Given above, you had 10 mins and 5 mins of free time for a total of 15 mins, which was used to “relax” and take your mind off work.
If for example, on a daily average, you have 15mins of free time, that results to 75mins of free time within a week, or a total of 5 hours a month.
Now what is my point? To be able to utilize your free time, you should make the most out of these.
This is what you can do to have “more” time in a day.
Rather that socializing with co workers or looking at social media sites, what you can do instead is to work on your important tasks given your free space.
“But 10 mins is not enough for me to get in a groove to do productive work”.
That is understandable.
The key here is to identify the tasks that you can do within a short period. Have a list of tasks that you can do under 10 mins.
Some of the things you can do under 10 mins could be:
Another thing you can do is to breakdown big tasks into smaller tasks. Then when that free time comes, you can use it to do a small task to accomplish your big task.
For example, a big task could be “Generate List of Features for Product”. We can break it down into:
With this approach, you have identified small tasks that you can do when that free time comes. You don’t need to think what you can do in that situation. You just execute, and tick another task off your to do list.
That’s it! Go and execute. Make the most out of your very important time.