Time flies, but that doesn’t mean it has to rule you. These ten tips will help you take control of your schedule and squeeze the most out of every minute, leaving you feeling productive and satisfied.
1. Time Isn’t Your Enemy, It’s Your Quest!
Ever feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day? Like you’re stuck in a time-loop doing endless chores and schoolwork? Time for a reality check! You’re not trapped, you’re the time-master of your own epic adventure!
Think about it. Did you spend hours perfecting your Minecraft world instead of cleaning your room? That wasn’t “not having time,” it was choosing one awesome thing over another. And guess what? That’s totally okay! It’s all about priorities. You wouldn’t complain about no pizza time if you spent the afternoon mastering tricks on your skateboard, right?
So, step one: ditch the “no time” excuse. It’s a sneaky villain trying to steal your control. Instead, be the hero! Recognize that every choice you make, big or small, shapes your day. Want to learn magic tricks? Guess what? Time to schedule some practice sessions!
Sure, there are responsibilities like school and chores, but even those are part of your adventure (think leveling up your responsibility skills!). Maybe you negotiate a later bedtime by showing off your sparkling clean room. Or maybe you turn family chores into a teamwork mission with epic music and rewards (like extra screen time!).
Remember, being a time-master is about playing smart. Use your time like a superpower: schedule your main quests (homework!), squeeze in quick side quests (reading a chapter during lunch!), and celebrate every victory (acing that test!).
So, young adventurer, go forth and conquer your day! Your time is your playground, not your prison. Make it epic!
2. Hell Yeah or Nah? Choose Your Epic Adventures!
Remember when every weekend felt like a choose-your-own-adventure book, overflowing with “YES!” moments? But now, with schedules bursting like backpacks after a school supply spree, those choices can feel overwhelming. That’s where the “Hell Yeah or Nah?” filter comes in, your superpower for saying “YES!” to epic adventures and “Nah, not today” to the rest.
Think back to that time you said “Yes” to three club meetings, a moviemarathon, and learning ukulele, only to end up feeling like a deflated balloon on Sunday. No regrets, but maybe a little burnt out? Yeah, we’ve all been there.
Here’s the deal:
When you’re young, “Yes” is often the default setting. Every opportunity shines like a golden ticket, and saying “No” feels like missing out. But trust me, saying “Yes” to everything is like trying to juggle ten pineapples – eventually, things get messy.
That’s why, as your schedule fills up, you gotta upgrade to “Hell Yeah or Nah!”. This supercharged filter helps you distinguish between the golden tickets and the participation trophies. It’s about choosing the activities that make your heart do a victory dance, the ones that scream “This is gonna be awesome!” in your head.
Learning to say “Nah” can feel weird, like breaking a habit. But remember, it’s not about being a party pooper. It’s about making space for the things that truly matter, the ones that light your inner fireworks. So, the next time your inbox explodes with invitations, channel your inner superhero and pick your missions. Choose the ones that ignite your “Hell Yeah!”, and politely decline the rest.
Remember, saying “Nah” isn’t about saying “No, way!” It’s about saying “Yes!” to a more awesome you.
3. Conquer Your Day with One Epic Win: The Daily Highlight Trick
Imagine this: you wake up energized, knowing exactly what will make your day awesome. No more drowning in endless to-do lists or feeling scattered by a million demands. This superpower is real, and it’s called the Daily Highlight.
Stolen straight from the “Make Time” book by Jake Knapp and John Zaretsky, this trick is deviously simple: every day, pick one thing that will be your heroic achievement, your “Hell Yeah!” moment. This isn’t just any task; it’s the star of your daily show.
Think of it like a video game. You only have one life, and you gotta make it EPIC. So, choose your most important, satisfying, or just plain-fun quest for the day. Ace that math test? Conquer a chapter of your novel? Master that skateboard trick? That’s your Daily Highlight.
Here’s how it works:
- Laser focus: With one target in your sights, distractions become invisible (well, almost). You’re like a warrior monk laser-focused on your mission.
- Motivation magic: Knowing you only have one thing to conquer makes it feel achievable, boosting your confidence and energy. No more to-do list mountains!
- Victory dance every night: Completing your Daily Highlight is like winning the gold medal of life (don’t worry, there’s a virtual trophy for everyone!). That feeling of accomplishment fuels your happiness and gives you momentum for tomorrow.
- But what about the days you skip setting your highlight?
Ah, the dreaded to-do list swamp. You get sucked in, trying to juggle a million tasks, and end up feeling frustrated and unproductive. No fun!
That’s why the Daily Highlight is your secret weapon. It’s the life raft that keeps you afloat in the sea of “shoulds” and “have-tos.” It cuts through the noise and helps you prioritize what truly matters.
So, unleash your inner superhero and choose your Daily Highlight today! Remember, it’s not about doing everything; it’s about doing the one thing that makes your day truly awesome.
4. Use a to-do list
Every morning, once you figured out what your daily highlight is, make a list of the other stuff that you have to do that day, and then shove it on a list that you may cross off with a pen as you go throughout your day. It doesn’t really matter what system you use for your to-do list. But again, there’s a general principle of productivity which is that our brain is for having ideas not for holding them and a big part of why we let stuff slip through the cracks when it comes to our Time Management and managing our productivity is because we haven’t written them down. It’s kind of cool having a physical to-do list in front of you that you can cross things off of it and it just feels nice. There’s something incredibly satisfying about crossing something off, which you just don’t get when you use an app.
5. Time blocking
Apparently, this is something that Elon Musk does all the time. And basically, the idea there is any time we need to do something, we put a block for it in our calendar. You don’t need to do this for absolutely everything. The more time you spend managing your productivity system, the less time you spend actually getting stuff done. And then it’s just all completely pointless.
Always schedule into your calendar at the start of the day as your daily highlight. If you’ve decided on your daily highlight, try your best to schedule it into your calendar.
That’s like really nice and reassuring because it means that one thing that you’ve decided is really, really important is always going to get done because it’s always on the schedule. And then if you need to move it around, you can move it around if something comes up but at least it’s there on the schedule by default.
When combine the daily highlight with time-blocking in the calendar is just incredibly useful.
Does everyone always kind of think that like, oh, but only one thing a day? Don’t you have to do more than that? And yeah, you 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 thing, the one most important thing to do that day, you’d make a hell of a lot of progress over the course of the year.
6. Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law, which is that work expands to fill the time that we allocate to it. The actionable advice here is to leverage artificial deadlines, even when it’s something like filming a video, and this doesn’t really have a deadline as you could literally do it whenever you want. The artificial deadline means the video is going to get done next weekend. And you’ve blocked out time in your calendar next weekend to film the video. And that’s an artificial deadline which means the video is going to get done.
Whereas if you just had it in your mind or on your to-do list without a deadline, without a schedule, it would just inevitably never, ever get done.
Leverage artificial deadlines to give yourself some pressure to get things done rather than being too generous with time schedules.
7. Protected time
For example, when you were an entrepreneur and you were like working for yourself, you end up basically being able to set whatever schedule you want but if you like making connections with people all around the internet, you get to a point where your day is filled with lots and lots of Zoom calls.
You need to keep your mornings completely free of any obligations or Zoom calls. And this has been an absolute game changer because in the morning that means you can wake up whenever you want. And it means that for a solid four hours at least you’ve got uninterrupted time where you can do whatever you want.
So if you’re interested in better ways to manage your time, figuring out what your protected time is going to be, time that is just for you and you alone and not for anyone else where no one is allowed to book something in your schedule.
Setting certain times for uninterruptable non-negotiable times to do certain tasks of work, e.g. morning for writing.
8. Delegation
Now this one is a little bit weird because normally when you say the word delegate, people imagine that, “Oh, well I can’t afford to delegate something. I don’t have enough money to delegate to hire someone.”
How much is your time actually worth? For example, you decided that your time is worth $25 an hour. And that means that anything you’re doing that you don’t enjoy, that you can outsource to someone, that you can delegate for less than $25 an hour.
It was fantastic because it freed up your time to do things that were adding more value to your life. And so whatever your circumstances are, think about what is the dollar value of your time, you can delegate stuff that’s cheaper than that to other people potentially.
Consider the dollar value of time, and delegate your time where you can afford it accordingly for tasks.
9. Automated scheduling
For example, now we’re in the world of Zoom calls and like chatting to people over the internet basically every day, you were wasting a lot of time in scheduling back and forth where it’d be like, “Hey, I want to talk to you, but like, are you free this time, Pacific time, this time, Eastern time this time, British Standard time…”, all this kind of stuff.
And we’d go back and forth with emails for a solid 10 days before anything would get done. You can try an app called Calendly. The idea behind Calendly is you conditionally send someone a link it has all of your availability and they can just book a slot in your calendar. It has literally saved you a lot of time and not having to worry about scheduling back-and-forth emails.
10. The choice to be satisfied
It’s very easy for us to get to the end of the day and to just feel chronically dissatisfied with what we’ve accomplished. At the end of the day, it’s like, “Oh, well, I filmed one video today but I could have filmed five videos. What’s wrong with me? Such a waste man.” And kind of internally beating ourselves up about this.
But you can choose to be satisfied at the end of the day. At the end of the day: “I’ll have filmed this video. I was planning to film three more videos, but I didn’t get around to doing those. That’s fine. I filmed one. I can choose to be satisfied with what I’ve done and that’s all good.”
It doesn’t change how much work you’ve done by you beating yourself up about it. It just makes you feel bad. And therefore, you can choose to feel good about how you’ve managed your time.
