Taking Control of Your Time

The following is an excerpt from The Other 8 Hours: Maximize Your Free Time to Create New Wealth & Purpose by Robert Pagliarini. Copyright © 2010 Other 8 Hours, LLC All Rights Reserved. The book tells people to live life to the fullest by radically changing the way they spend “The Other 8 Hours” – the 8 hours not spent sleeping or working.

We’re going to dissect your average day and look for time wasters we can eliminate, non-critical tasks we can reduce, and pockets of opportunity we can seize.  You can either create your own form or you can download one from other8.com.

Step 1 – Big Picture

Time is the great equalizer. The big shot CEO who oozes money, power, and success doesn’t have any more hours in the day than the single and overworked mother bartending at the club downtown. It’s not how much time they have—they both have the same—it is how they invest their time that makes the difference.

The reality is that few of us actually have a full 8 hours available. It takes time to get ready in the morning, drive to work, eat, pee, and mow the lawn. Nobody is forcing us to mow the lawn, but we need to do it anyway.

So, what do you do during the other 8 hours? I’m sure some of this time is put to good use and some of it is wasted.  The only way to know for sure is to take inventory of the way you spend your time.  Complete the exercise below but keep in mind the following tips before you get started…

• Guess. This ain’t NASA, folks. Put down the calculator. We’re just trying to get a rough idea about where your typical day goes.
• Include only workdays. Don’t include weekends. Unless you work on the weekends, those days are all yours!
• Average it out. If you workout three days a week for an hour, calculate the average per day by turning the hours into minutes (3 hours x 60 minutes = 180 minutes), and then divide by 5 days (180 minutes ÷ 5 days = 36 minutes) to get the average minutes per day. (Yes, I know I just told you to put away your calculator).
• Don’t cheat. This is a tool to help you determine how you actually spend your time, not how you’d like to spend your time (we’ll get to that later). So, if your goal is to workout for an hour three days a week, but you never do it, time spent exercising would be zero.
• Pick the primary task. Most people do several things at once. For example, you might call a friend while driving to work or read a magazine while on the Elliptical. How should you count this time? Only count the primary task. So, for our examples, you’d count your time as spent “driving” and “exercising.”

List the amount of time you spend:

• Sleeping/Napping – Time you spend sleeping or lying down with the intent to sleep. Time dozing off during meetings doesn’t count.
• Work – Time at work. Notice I didn’t say time spent working, since this would be a very different number compared to time spent at work. Count lunch and breaks as “work.”
• Driving – Basically any time you are in your car going somewhere: commuting, dropping kids off at soccer, running errands, etc.
• Meals/Snacks – This includes not only eating food but also preparing it and cleaning up. Don’t include shopping here; we’ll get to that below.
• Personal – This is a big category. It includes things such as showering, using the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex as well as the G-rated, boring things you do such as getting your hair cut, nails done, massage, etc.
• Exercise – Time at the gym, walking, biking, stretching, etc.
• Watching TV – Obviously includes time spent watching TV and movies at home and in the theater.
• Personal growth – Time spent reading, learning, planning your future, taking courses, etc.
• Home maintenance – Includes grocery shopping, bill paying, phone calls to plumbers, etc.
• Family – Time with spouse/partner and/or kids when you are really engaged with them. Watching Dora the Explorer with your three year old would not be considered “family” time.
• Spirituality – Time spent at church/temple, in Bible study, in small spiritual groups, praying, meditating, etc.
• Helping – All the time you spend working and helping others without pay such as volunteering, helping your neighbor, mowing your grandma’s lawn, etc.
• Socializing – Time with friends, talking on the phone, texting, at parties, etc.
• Kids School – Any time spent in PTA meetings, school conferences, working in the football concession stand, etc.
• Other leisure. This is a catch-all category for everything else such as surfing the internet, listening to music, blogging, etc.   

Step 2 – Tasks

Within each time category (e.g., Socializing), write down all the things you do during this time. For example, talking on the phone, meeting friends for coffee, texting, emailing, etc. Try to think about all of the tasks within each category. As another example, let’s say you watch four hours of TV a night. List the shows you watch.

Step 3 – Time spent on each task 

Next, write down approximately how much time you spend on each task. Do you watch the local evening news for an hour each night? Do you blog for 30 minutes a day? 

Step 4 – PERK:  Postpone, Eliminate, Reduce, or Keep

This is where things get interesting. For every task you must select from one of the following:  Postpone, Eliminate, Reduce, or Keep.

• Postpone – This is when you can shift the expense into the future.  For example, to create free time to complete a project, gain a new skill, take a class, etc., you might want to hit the “pause” button on another task. For me, I really want to become fluent in Spanish but I also wanted to write this book. I could have done both, but it would have taken a lot longer to write the book and to learn Spanish. I made a conscious decision to Postpone Spanish to focus more time on the book.

Go through each of your tasks and see if you can postpone any of them. If you can, you will free up valuable time to focus on your more important goals.

• Eliminate – This means you can completely remove this task from your life. I want you to start cutting and slashing like a machete-wielding tribesman going through a jungle. Buh-bye. What can you eliminate? Better yet, what can’t you eliminate? We do so much crap and make so many commitments that our natural reaction is to protest that we can’t eliminate anything. But doing what you’ve always done will get you what you’ve always got. Don’t be a big wuss. Start eliminating. Will you die if you cancel your Twitter account or if you stop watching Lost?  For those things that you can’t bring yourself to eliminate entirely, decide to just eliminate them for three weeks. If at the end of the three weeks you want to resurrect the task, go for it.

• Reduce – Maybe you just can’t bring yourself to completely eliminate something, but can you reduce it? Absolutely. Go through your tasks and ask yourself if you really need to spend that much time on it. Can you cut it back a bit? You can reclaim so much of your life just by reducing unimportant and unsatisfying tasks. There’s probably something in your life that sucks up your time that you could eliminate or reduce. Maybe it’s fantasy football, TMZ.com, celebrity gossip websites, YouTube, or MySpace?

• Keep – Undoubtedly there will be some tasks that you don’t want to eliminate, reduce, or postpone. That’s okay. For these, just check the “keep” column.

Comments

[sallystruthers]

Ok, I completed my list. It seems I'm having sex 20 hours each day. The other 4 I am sleeping.

[texashaze]

This article is interesting and it made me think about managing my time better since I have a moonlighting business. Are there any other tips or books out there? I was also thinking how this book would be good to listen to in my car since I don't have much time to read.

[Mike]

"I made a conscious decision to Postpone Spanish to focus more time on the book."

I'm not so sure you made the right decision....

[Crystal]

@sallystruthers
You are my kind of people!!! Hahahaha!!!

On topic, I was surprised when I followed through on this whole thing...multi-tasking is a life saver!!! I only have 2 hours a day that I could change (tv time) and I like tv, so I'm keeping those too. Yay! Here's what I ended up with:

Sleeping – 8 1/2 hours

Work – 8 1/2 hours...although I do get most of my reading and internet time done here too...it's been slow.

Driving – 1 1/4 hours

Meals/Snacks – 40 minutes...my husband does most of the cooking...I assemble.

Personal – 50 minutes

Watching TV – 2 Hours...my husband and I watch our favorite shows and chat.

Personal growth – 30 minutes...I read and blog at work usually or multitask while watching TV.

Home maintenance – 15 minutes...thank you Jacquie (our maid)...I usually only have to spend 45 minutes grocery shopping a week. I also unload the dishwasher and run a load of laundry every 3-4 days.

Family – 1 hour...this is the half hour we spend just talking before bed and the half hour we rehash our days while my husband cooks.

Helping – None...I only volunteer on the weekends and we aren't fostering any dogs right now.

Socializing – 30 minutes...I call my mom once a week and my grandparents once a week for about an hour each. I also schedule stuff with our friends for the weekends and Friday night.

I put everything in the Keep column since it all makes me happy or has to be done (1.5 hours of Driving and Home Maintenance).

[lincmercguy]

This post cracks me up. We recently had a program enacted at work where we had to keep track of time spent on everything to "increase productivity". I''m sure some people benefited, but they tried a one-size-fits-all strategy across the globe.

What I found was that trying to keep track of all of this stuff actually hurt my productivity quite a bit. I'm a pretty good multitasker when it comes to work. When I'm waiting for one operation to complete, I'll switch systems and work on something else. While I'm going about my day, my boss will find me and ask me some questions and get opinions about projects that are still a couple of months away. He's admitted that he does this on purpose to get me brainstorming in the back of my mind to come up with some good ideas. So you can imagine keeping track of all of this stuff took quite a bit of time. And beyond that, it was extremely demoralizing.

After a couple of months, my boss told me not to bother with the project tracking. Thankfully, he got it, and he knew my productivity is way higher than most engineers' (I can't really BS him on that either because he has a similar background and has been in the industry for a lot longer than he is).

Honestly, if I had to continue the program, I would have found another job or just refused to do it and deal with the consequences.

My point being, don't try to do this for a long period of time, it will drive you nuts. And to those managers who think that this might help improve productivity, don't bother. If you don't already know this information, this won't solve your problem.