Time Abundance from Time Scarcity

3 Simple Perspectives for Leveraging Your Time

The Secret to Productivity

Focus on something that is a priority for uninterrupted long periods of time.

That’s it. End of article.

Jokes aside, that’s the truth.

After reading Laura Vanderkam’s book 168 Hours, I learned that we really do have a lot more time than we think. Here’s some of my biggest takeaways infused with my own thoughts:

Wrong Perspective of Time: Zoom Out!

For the longest time I thought I had to get everything important to me done in a 24-hour time frame. And that time frame will repeat over and over until the rest of my life.

The truth couldn’t be farther from that. On a day-to-day basis Our Lives are quite unpredictable, anything can happen and hijack our day no matter how strict we are with our schedules.

However if we zoom out a little bit and look at life on a weekly basis, we can see that for the most part our life isn’t too different from week to week. And that allows us to build some repetitive structure that will set us up for success in the long-term.

Secret Tip: Pick your favorite calendar app end start looking at your life on a weekly basis. Fill in large chunks in your calendar that will repeat often.

Calendars are nothing mind-blowing. We’ve all used one, at least in a joke. “Let me check my calendar.”

Most people view it as a tool to view what’s planned. I invite you to invert this perspective and instead look at it in terms of how many empty blocks of time you have left.

When you look at calendars as a tool of “what’s planned”, you’re looking at life from an abundance perspective. As human’s were great at not appreciating things when they are abundant.

We’re also great at appreciating things when they are scarce. And when you look at time just as that, scarce. Then you will start leveraging it a lot more.

Look at all the empty blocks of time and notice; those empty blocks of time are precisely why you are exactly where you are and not where you want to be.

Warped Perspective of Time: Zoom In!

Once you’ve adopted the perspective of time being 7 day cycles repeating over and over for the rest of your life, it’s time to zoom in and see how you are actually spending your time.

As humans we are really great at overestimating the things we don’t like and underestimating the things we do like.

Let’s look at your day at work. Whether you work 30, 40, 50 or more hours a week, how much of that time are you actually working? How much of the time spent on your work chair are you doing work that is actually meaningful?

Was all of the time at work spent on something that is a priority? Something that is advancing your career towards where you want to go? Was all the time you spent at work meaningful?

Most likely a bulk of it was spent on things that are not important yet at recurring such as check email, going to meetings and waiting for others to show up or speak, or doing some mindless activity that “needs to be done”.

Fires need to be put out but they are actually a distraction from meaningful work, such as work that prevents the fires in the first place.

To be powerful and reclaim your time you have to know where your time is being spent. You must audit your time and the best way to do that is to create a weekly timesheet and see exactly where your time is going.

I strongly recommend breaking your life into 30 minute blocks because they are much more manageable and easier to keep track of. Once you get the hang of it, you can view your world in smaller time-periods such as 15 minute or 10 minute blocks. This way you will have even more insight of how much time you have available.

Pockets of time are always around, and once you can see them, you can use them towards the things you love and living more peacefully. It’s ironic how structuring your time ends up liberating your life.

Prioritize

We all have a long to-do list of items that “need to be done”, Within the list some things are urgent, some things are important, and some things are neither.

Having a Clear Vision and idea of what you want out of life is so critical. It affects all the other areas of life especially when it comes to time management. Knowing what your priorities are allow you to avoid tasks that don’t need to be done so that you have the time to do what it actually needs to be done.

Awareness of your priorities alone isn’t enough. Yes, it can help you sift in the moment between important and unimportant tasks and Urgent and non-urgent tasks. However, it’s only through reflection that we as humans truly evolve into something greater.

Once you have audited your week you can look back and see what was necessary and not necessary. What in retrospect turned out not to be so important or urgent or necessary. And on top of that you can start seeing where in the day do you perform the best. Is it in the mornings, evenings, afternoons. Everyone is a little bit different but once you have a weariness of when you perform the best you can allocate your hardest and most important tasks during those times. And when you are mentally on downtime you can do the more menial and less important tasks.

One more point to add to priorities is that some work is necessary because it keeps you from getting fired but it doesn’t help you get promoted. And other work is important and adds value to your role allows you to get promoted. Being able to distinguish the two allows you to prioritize accordingly.

Once you’ve begun auditing your life, you can start seeing where your time is going. You can look from a bird’s-eye view and see where time is actually wasted.

You can start seeing things like when are you able to achieve the most, what parts of the day do you perform the best. And then allocate the most difficult and priority work items during those parts of the day.

The parts of the day where you perform the least, you can allocate them on the least meaningful but necessary work items such as checking email and menial tasks.

In the end

The end Parkinson’s law plays a huge role when it comes to time. Our time must be filled with something oh, and if we do not take initiative and control our time someone or something else will.

If you do have dreams, something you yearn for, something you wish to achieve or acquire, then controlling your time is the most effective action you can take to create new opportunities in your future.

Originally published at https://mentalchai.substack.com on February 17, 2022.