4 simple ways to make the best use of your time

Most articles on productivity seem geared to CEOs or people who have extreme levels of self-control and energy. They may include some useful ideas, but I can’t imagine myself ever being able to stick to the recommendations. If you’re a normal person who is just looking to waste a bit less time, try the following tips.

> Don’t copy someone else’s playbook

Ideas from productivity gurus (and other people in general) can be very useful. However, the strategies you use in your life are going to be extremely personal to you. Each of us has a unique combination of our personality, preferences, lifestyle, and circumstances. Therefore what works for someone else won’t necessarily gel for you. Also, we get bored with strategies and our circumstances change (like you become a parent or your job changes), requiring new approaches.

Keep in mind that it’s normal to need to tweak your strategies after initially trying them. When you first implement a strategy you’ve read about or thought of for yourself, it might work somewhat but not brilliantly. For example, you create a system for keeping your charging cords or your incoming mail more organised but then find you’re not following through with your own system. Troubleshoot whatever aspects aren’t working. Through this process you’ll find the version of the strategy that’s optimal for you.

> Time is money

Think about investing your time just as you would think about investing your money. When you invest your money, you don’t expect to invest $100 and get $100 back. You expect to get an ongoing return that exceeds your initial investment. When investing your time, depriotise tasks where your effort won’t have a lasting benefit. Try to prioritise behaviours where you can put in a one time effort and reap ongoing rewards. For example, you create a better system for your household for where you put receipts, so that when you need to return an item you don’t need to spend 30 minutes hunting for the receipt. Or, at work, you create an intake packet of information for new employees in your workplace, so you don’t need to keep verbally explaining the same information.

> rules that don’t serve you

Self-imposed rules are self-generated assumptions about what we must or should do, that we just blindly follow. He told me about a cooking rule he had where he’d extract every last piece of garlic from each bulb, even if it virtually required tweezers to pull the flesh out of the last tiny, scrappy cloves. This is a very minor example but it illustrates the principle. When you’ve created a rule for yourself you can choose to just drop it. Especially if your temperament leans towards being a conscientious perfectionist, you’re likely to have all sorts of personal rules for how you do things, that in reality, might not make any sense.

> simplify your decision making

Heuristics are rules of thumb that remove a lot of the mental effort and drain we experience from decision making. They’re shortcuts aimed at producing good outcomes most of the time, with far less effort than exhaustively thinking through every single decision. I use heuristics for prioritising, and I have a few different versions.

I do jobs that are worth over $100 before anything worth less than $100.

If I’m in the mood for writing, then I write. A more general version of this rule might be that, whenever you’re in the mood for working on things that are important but don’t have deadlines, do that.

I prefer starting things to finishing them and tend to end up with a lot of half finished tasks, so whenever I’m in the mood for completing something I’ve already started, I do that.

Eliminate self-imposed rules that don’t serve you. Create new ones that help you focus on the big picture.

> Logical choices

No one likes to feel boxed in, which can happen if your system for prioritising is too rigid. When you’re improving time management, it’s important to consider how you want to use that reclaimed time. The freedom to make some choices that aren’t very efficient is one of the things you might want extra time to indulge in. Another benefit of doing some activities in a relaxed way, in which you’re not focused on efficiency, is that it gives your mind a chance to wander. This can provide insights and epiphanies, and stop the focus of your life and work from becoming too narrow.

Think about investing your time just as you would think about investing your money. When you invest your money, you don’t expect to invest $100 and get $100 back