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Heart palpitations, then heat, then cold, an unceasing swarm of thoughts in my head: “Why couldn’t you leave 10 minutes early ?!”, “How is that possible?”, “God, how embarrassing! we feel when we are late. Can such situations be prevented? How to learn to soberly evaluate your list of tasks and do much more?
Huge distances, many hours of traffic jams, extremely fast pace – all these are the hallmarks of big cities, from which, alas, there is no escape. But it is in our power to get more free time, which means a different quality of life. Here’s how.
1. Switch offline to online
Products. You can find an extra free hour a day by freeing yourself from the road – for example, to the store. Today, many hypermarkets offer home delivery. Orders can be placed on the website or through the app.
Time saving: 3 hours per week.
Consulting. Thanks to Skype, you can get advice from a lawyer, coach, psychotherapist and even a pediatrician without leaving your home. You can find trusted professionals through forums or by hashtags on social networks. Be sure to pay attention to customer reviews.
Time saving: 2-3 hours.
Education. Instead of traveling to the other end of the city for courses, you can take a lesson via the Internet at any convenient time and in any place. If you do not have enough live communication, you can alternate classes online and offline.
Time saving: 3-5 hours.
Payments. Prefer to pay utility bills and taxes the old fashioned way? So, spend precious minutes, which in a few months add up to hours. It’s time to connect online banking and make payments online.
Time saving: 1 hour.
2. Recommend a routine
House. Do only your favorite household chores, feel free to transfer all the rest to special services and companies. Finding assistants who will clean up the house, iron the laundry and even walk the dog is not difficult.
Time saving: 4 hours.
Food. Instead of racking your brains over menus and flipping through websites with recipes, use services that offer options for dishes and deliver products in the right proportions. You will only have to cook food – unless, of course, you entrust this task to others.
Time saving: 1 hour.
Job. Unless you’re in a managerial position, the idea of a personal assistant may seem odd. Nevertheless, it is quite realistic and reasonable. You can hire a freelancer living in another city who will remotely perform small assignments: prepare presentations for clients, write texts, update information on the site. You can find a good freelancer on a special website or on the recommendations of friends on social networks.
Savings: 4-5 hours.
Beauty. Hair and nail care, facial cosmetic procedures should be entrusted to professionals, calling masters to your home. Some beauty salons offer this service, or you can find a hashtag specialist on Instagram.
Savings: 1 hour.
3. Plan ahead
It is very important to regularly compare the amount of time you planned to spend on a task with how much it actually took. Did you have 45 minutes to do something? When you’re done, make a note in your plan of whether or not you’ve actually completed the three-quarters of an hour. Practice shows that in large cities errors in calculations occur all the time – it almost always takes more time than we expect.
It is worth calculating the coefficient by which you need to multiply the embedded time. It is necessary to take into account traffic jams, delays of the people you meet, force majeure, and in the future, schedule cases already taking into account this coefficient.
Savings: 1,5 hours.
4. Be flexible
In big cities, planning things by the hour and minute is quite difficult. 9:30 a.m. meeting, 10:15 a.m. phone call with a client, 11:30 a.m. planning meeting… This is suitable for those who work in the office, and even then not always. If you are a mother on maternity leave, a freelancer, or are not tied to a permanent place of work, you need to plan things more flexibly, based on time intervals, and not on exact numbers.
Yes, meetings should still be scheduled at a certain time, but it is better to allocate time intervals for parsing mail, brainstorming and other tasks: for example, from 9:00 to 13:00, from 14:00 to 17:00 or from 17:00 to 19:00. Otherwise, the postponement of any business will entail not only the “slipping” of the entire schedule, but also your dissatisfaction with yourself.
Economy: nerves.
5. Calm down and recover
A hyperactive environment creates a false feeling for many that we need to do as much as possible in a unit of time, otherwise we will miss something, we will not catch up with the rest. But this race is only in our head. It is important to stop participating in this “competition” as soon as possible, otherwise there is a great risk of wasting the last of your strength and finally burning out.
It takes a lot longer to recover from breakdowns than planned recuperation, so it’s worth scheduling activities that fill you with energy and not canceling them under any circumstances.
Economy: energy.
6. Set a goal
For successful planning, you need to clearly understand why, in fact, you are doing all this, what you will spend the freed time on. For a romantic dinner? Games with kids? Meeting with friends? Meditation? Education?
Think about those pleasant activities that free time can give you, keep them in your head, and then time management will seem like an exciting game.
About the Developer
Anna of All Saints – Founder of the Women’s Time Management Academy .