Where Is All Your Time Going? (Part 2/2)

Click HERE to read Part 1, and click HERE to access the Free Template.

If you feel like you have little to no control over your time — like your priorities are managing you, and not the other way around — you’re hardly alone.

In 2017, Microsoft partnered with a career-planning platform, Levo, to produce the “Mastering Your Productivity in 2017” survey. They discovered that while on average 84% of the 1,500 respondents indicated that productivity is essential to happiness, 12% struggled to manage their time.In fact, those numbers were as high as 43% among younger respondents.

I suspect a that a significant contributor to why people feel like they’re not in control of their time has a lot to do with how intentionally they’re using their calendars (if at all). Now consider this: in a 2016 poll of their online survey panel, online market research provider AskYourTargetMarket found that 55.7% of respondents didn’t use calendar apps.

Therein lies the rub.

The year was 2012, and my calendar my calendar was becoming increasingly airtight. A new excuse for neglected priorities was being generated with every new 30–60 minute event in my calendar:

• “My week is packed; I can’t go to the gym.”

• “I have to eat out; I don’t have time to prepare my meals.”

• “I can’t dedicate enough time to my startup right now.”

• “Family and friends have to wait; this project needs me.”

While I was using a calendar app (Google Calendar) to manage my time, I wasn’t using it intentionally. In fact, I was using it the way I assume that most people use their banking apps: to see how much money they have at their disposal. But that’s only half that battle. The money savvy, I’ve learned, use their balance to inform their budget. By not analyzing where I was actuallyspending my time versus how I wanted to spend my time, I invited my priorities to manage me (instead of the other way around).

The result? I burned out spectacularly.

That’s why I swear by The 168-Hour Audit. It’s a simple exercise that will completely reframe the way you view your time. At the very least, it will rescue your time. At best, it will unlock the hidden capacity needed for breakthrough productivity.

A snapshot of my 168-Hour Audit. I‘ve packaged it, along with a free template, that you can access here.

Once you map out how you’re actually spending your time as well as how youwant to be spending it, the real hard work begins. First, come to terms with the disparities between the two categories. When you do this exercise, chances are, there will be inconsistencies between how you currently spend your time and how you want to spend your time.

Ask yourself the following:

• What is taking up most of my time? Do I really want this to take up most of my time?

• What do I need to do but am not allocating enough time towards it?

• Where are some areas I am spending far more time than I should be?

At this stage, after you’ve asked yourself the questions in the previous step, feel free to recalibrate how you want to spend your time. Consider how you can reduce the amount of time spent in specific areas. Consider ways in which you can merge areas, especially areas that aren’t necessarily conducive to advancing your projects. I like to call this practice “converting downtime into uptime.” Consider the following:

• Can your commuting time double as your quiet time? Check out Audible’s selection of audiobooks.

• Need a spot? Perhaps your physical fitness time can merge with some family/friend time.

• Can you merge education time and self-care time? Try firing up a podcast during your morning routine.

Get creative with your consolidation. Then, build a system to reclaim your time. Open up your calendar and start carving. Block off time for the gym, time for reading, time for meditation, etc. Block off time for any of the areas of your week that you wish to reclaim. Make these time slots non-negotiable. Your schedule now works around these areas. You aren’t allowed to book meetings or anything else in these slots. Now, go into Asana or whatever task-managing app you’re using and create recurring tasks intended to modify your behaviour over the next 40 days. As renowned performance coach Robin Sharma says:

“Remember the 40-Day Rule. Any new practice will feel foreign, stressful, hard and for the first 40 days as you re-pattern.”

Time is currency. We’re all allocated the same 168 hours per week. In the temporal sense, there is a finite amount of time we can spend being places and doing things. But, if you start to value your time more than you value your money, then you can increase your capacity for creativity and the energy necessary to generate far more output in those 168 hours than the average person can. This practice is a process, so please revisit it as often as needed.

Budgets are reflections of priorities, and calendars are budgets of your most precious resource: time. What’s not in your calendar likely won’t happen.

If you truly care about it, put it in your calendar.

Access your FREE 168-Hour Template by clicking HERE.

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