4 Keys to the Best Ways to Manage Your Time

Suppose you can magically add an hour or two to each day of your life — would you do it?

For many people, the answer is hell yes, because we all feel like we have no time. And we truly believe that achieving our goals of excellence would be much easier if we had more time.

If I just had a little more time, I would do work out, spend quality time with family, and start a youtube channel. Let’s be honest: We’ve all experienced it.

Yet, I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear: Time isn’t an issue here.

I have different goals, responsibilities, and jobs so I might naturally use my time differently than you do. So time works differently for each of us.

The good news is that there are common rules that are applicable to all of us, wherever we are and whatever we want

1. We own all of our Time

When I first realized this, my life genuinely changed because I used to think I don’t have time to do stuff.

I don’t know where I read it but I came across this like, which said something like

“ At any given moment you are doing what you most want to be doing.”

And that was a very empowering thing to me. It helped me realise that my time is entirely in my control.

Like now, I writing this article because I want to be. Earlier today, I spent 3 hours playing “Valornat” because that’s what I wanted to do.

I could not have said I don’t have the time to work out today instead, it was a case of I’m actively choosing not to make time to work out today.

When it comes to time management, step one is always to recognise that “We are always in control of our time.”

2. Daily Highlight

I picked this up from this book called “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. This is called Daily Highlight.

This is very simple basically, the idea is that every day we decide this thing, this one thing is gonna be my highlight of the day. This is the only thing I need to get done today and on the days where I set a daily highlight and I try and do this every day, I always get the thing done.

I’m always really happy at the end of the day. But if I have a day where I don’t set my daily highlight then I kind of drown in my to-do list.

I have this just image in my head of like, oh yeah, I need to do this and this and this and that. It’s a lot harder to get stuff done.

Whereas on days when I have the daily highlight, I have that just one thing that I’m focusing on, this is the most urgent or the most satisfying or the most fun thing I have to do today.

3. Time Blocking

Apparently, it’s something that Elon Musk does all the time. Basically, the idea is there if we need to do something, we put a block for it in our calendar.

So I don’t like doing this for absolutely everything because I’m a bit of a waste man. I think the more time I spend managing my productivity system, the less time I spend actually getting stuff done and then it’s just all completely pointless.

The one thing that I always schedule into my calendar at the start of the day is my daily highlight.

So if I’ve decided my daily highlight is writing this article usually, well, I’ll try my best to schedule it into my calendar at the time when I know I’m gonna write this article.

If my daily highlight is meeting with a client or my daily highlight is making changes to my website I will schedule it at like for a block in my calendar.

This thing where you combine the daily highlight with time-blocking in the calendar is just incredibly useful.

Everyone always kind of thinks that like, oh, but only one thing a day?

Don’t you have to do more than that and yeah, you do kind of have to do more than that in most of our lives. But imagine if every single day for the next year you could actually do the one most important thing, you’d make a hell of a lot of progress over the course of the year.

4. Parkinson’s Law

“ Work expands to fill the time that we allocate to it.”

So if I have to write an article in a day and I give myself the whole day to write that article inevitably, it’s gonna take all day to write the article.

Whereas, if I only give myself half an hour or an hour to write the Article and I fill my day up with other things, then inevitably I get the article done in a small amount of time.

The actionable advice here is to leverage artificial deadlines, even when it’s something like writing an E-Book or working on a writing course for beginners where I kinda, talk about tools, resources to write a good article.

This doesn’t really have a deadline I could literally do it whenever I want. It’s a purely optional project but I’ve set myself the goal that, I’m gonna write all of this E-Book next weekend. I’ve blocked out time in my calendar for next weekend.

That’s an artificial deadline which means the course is gonna get done. Whereas if I just had it in my mind or on my to-do list without a deadline, without a schedule, it would just inevitably never, ever get done.

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Happy Reading see you soon.