How to get more hours in your day

How to get more hours in your day.

It’s true, we can’t manage time. So how on earth then do you get more hours in your day?

If you read the best way to get through your to-do list and be successful, you may remember I mentioned that your to-do list should be your best friend. 

Your list helps you stay on track. It’s kind of like the lines in the road when you drive on the highway, it keeps you in the lane you need to be in to avoid colliding with another vehicle.

It’s great to have a list, and the idea of that list is so you get things done. And to do that you need to have hours in your day.

Get more hours in your day.

The way to get more hours in your day is to first know how much time you have to work for each day. And you must also know how long things take you to do.

If you only have four hours to work, you cannot put five hours of work into that day. I’ve said it before, I used to smoosh 60 minutes of work into 15 minutes. I was famous for saying “I can do that in 15 minutes.” 

An example of this is you only have five hours to work and you have four Zoom meetings all that will run (you hope) one hour each. Meaning you’ll be on Zoom for at minimum of four hours.

And you have a training audio you want to listen to that is an hour. It also has parts for you to actually work on. Yet you “forget” that latter part and you only give yourself an hour to do it.

Can you see how you now have LESS hours in your day? 

Only by being specific with the time you have, what you will do in that time and knowing how long each task will take you can you have more hours in your day.

Making time work for you.

The way that I teach my clients how to have more hours in their day is by having them get clear on knowing how much time they actually have to work and how long what they are doing (and need to be doing) takes. And then write it out.

So you can see what I mean by knowing how much time you have and what it is you are doing in that time, an example of one of my recent days is below.

Before I headed into my office, I had a list in my head of things I really wanted to do on this particular day. Things such as file maintenance, office organization, and things of that nature.

I determined my workday would be 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. And as you’ll see, there was not any additional time to do the things I had in my head. Unless, of course, I wanted to overwork, which I did not :

• Admin/Money Mgmt 9:00-10:00a
• Prep & Client Delivery 10:00a-12:00p
• Lunch and Dogs 12:00-12:30p
• Marketing 12:30-2:00p
• Prep & Client Deliver 2:00-4:00p
• End of Day Admin/Email/Wrap up 4:00-5:00p

Can you see that once you know where your time is actually going in a day, it makes it easier to eliminate other items?

Even though I had that list in my head, once I saw where my time was allotted to for the day, I could then determine the next best time container to put in what I wanted to do.

When you think and work in terms of “Time Containers” (as in you have a specific amount of time) and nothing else will fit in it, it makes it so much easier to be realistic with what you can actually get done.

Determining your time is key to getting things done.

Remember, you need to determine how much time you think something will take before you can actually put it into your hours.

If you have no idea then the first time you do it, TRIPLE the time you think it will take. This works because you have ample time to get the task done and the key is, it gets DONE.

Sure you may have time left over. And when you do, guess what that means, you have MORE hours! Isn’t that just cool and well, what you are striving for.

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