Seven Tips For Making The Most of Your Time at Home and at Work

We all live in such a fast paced world today where time constantly feels like it’s in short supply.  In fact, whilst we have much more flexible working lives due to technology the world seems to have simultaneously picked up pace in recent years due to the advancements in technology and in particular social media that means we are always logged in, and find it much harder to switch off and enjoy the simple things.

Indeed, today, with social media ruling our lives we often find our leisure time is just as much for our social media profile as it is for ourselves, and in a world where we are so busy yet have more pressure than ever to be doing fun and cool stuff the whole time… we need to start getting back on top of how we use our most precious resource of all.

Today, many people are looking for ways to make more time than they are money, which is in contrast to how things were a decade ago.  Time seems to be more appreciated due to its constant lack of supply, and the paradigm that whilst we can quite easily make more money we can never make more time seems to be more on people’s minds.

In fact, today, many people get resentful of wasting their time or having to put so many hours into working for someone else, particularly if at the same time, they don’t feel they are being paid what they’re worth.  See, a person used to give their time away without much consideration for what it was truly worth, but whilst it was once an overlooked resource, today we all seem to be becoming much more mindful about how we invest our time in order to squeeze the the most out of life.

We all know that time is an incredibly valuable resource so let’s take a look at some time saving tips that can help you squeeze the most out of your precious time.

1. GET A CLEANER

Cleaning is a necessary evil yet it often takes too much time away from much more productive or fun activities, and perhaps a more intelligent approach to take with regard to this is to consider the hourly value of your time – for instance, if you were to be self employed and make $50 profit per hour, then it would make sense to pay a cleaner $20 and work an extra hour yourself.

Even if you aren’t on a particularly high income, hiring a cleaner can be a fantastic time saving tool and might be worthwhile shifting around your budget to make room for this luxury, as it can save you a lot of time.

2. WORK REMOTELY

If it’s for you, working remotely, or from home, or at least in a way that enables you to work more flexible hours can make a huge difference in your life.  This not only saves time in terms of your daily commute to and from work, but also money, as there is a considerable cost associated with the daily commute to work.

Similarly, if you study, online courses are often cheaper than traditional courses due to the reduced overheads plus you don’t need to travel to the course, pay for extra accommodation, and so on, meaning you save some money that could be better spent too.

3. FIND THE FAST TRACK

It’s very easy in life to dilly dally and go around in circles rather than find the most direct and efficient route to achieving a particular outcome; for instance, we can spend hours trying to clean our cars whereas we could just drop it off at a valet service and have it waiting for us after a couple of hours where we can be doing something more fun or productive with our time.

Similarly, when it comes to selling your home, it can pay to find a fast and more efficient way to buy your house such as with flying homes and consider asking for slightly less than you might desire in order to achieve a quick sale, as remember, your time is so much more valuable than money — and sometimes it pays to just get things done quickly.

4. ORGANIZE YOUR TIME

We can often find ourselves spending far too much time living in reaction to work – trying to fit our lives around our work, where it can feel like we are living to work rather than working to live; but it doesn’t have to feel that way.

The amount of time you can save by having a good planning and organisational system in place is incredible.  In fact, a lot of “time management” comes down to planning your tasks in advance, prior to starting them, so that you can keep on top of things and make progress in ways that really count rather than getting lost in “busy work”.

5. RELY ON A TEAM

Most people, and particularly entrepreneurs, feel they need to do everything by themselves and many people such as business owners and parents often find the concept of delegating important tasks to be a rather scary prospect.

That said, it can be good to assemble a team of people to support you and delegate tasks to specialists within each area whether this is within business or even around your home, and helping with your family.  No one person can do everything themselves.

6.  THE PARETO PRINCIPLE

The Pareto Principle, sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule suggests that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of the final outcome.  This means that around 20 percent of the tasks you have on your to-do list will create 80 percent of the outcome you want to achieve — meaning the majority, 80 percent, of tasks on your to-do list aren’t going to contribute that much to getting the outcome you desire.

It’s therefore critically important you focus your attention on the most important areas of an activity, that will actually contribute the most to producing the results you wish to attain.

The first step with this is to work out what these areas are and then create a list of priority tasks from this.

Then, the next thing to do from here is to write a list of all your tasks for the day, week, or month and then determine which tasks are going to create the greatest impact in terms of the end result; and make sure you do these tasks, each day, as an absolute priority.  

7.  WORK WHEN YOU WORK

Brian Tracy, a pre-eminent time management expert who wrote the book “Eat That Frog” asserts the importance of the concept of working when you work and resting when your rest; meaning, if you are going to sit down to work — ensure you have a singular focus on the task at hand in a distraction free environment rather than trying to work with the TV on in the background.

Similarly, if you’re going to spend some time resting then make sure you make this a time of proper rest and relaxation where your mind is free from the concerns of work.

Today, particularly when working from home, people will often multitask by working with their laptops whilst simultaneously watching over the kids or having the TV on in the background; this is one of the worst things you can do in terms of making the most of your time — as it’s the worst of both worlds, and you don’t get to fully rest or fully focus.