5 Ways to Create More Time in Your Workday

Finding ways to create more time in my workday helps my sanity and my goals. Currently, I work 11 hours per day for 5-6 days. At first, it sounded doable, and I was thinking about the money. But I quickly realized that I needed a way to keep up with the things that were just as if not more important to me.

Now, I feel better about the alignment between my responsibilities and the 24 hours available each day.

It is all about working smarter instead of harder.

Here are five ways to create more time in your workday.

1

Set some rules for yourself.

Like any organization, country, or household that wants to run smoothly, you can create rules and laws for yourself.

Coming up with just a few simple rules can help you to map out a path for the life you wish to create.

These rules could be a paragraph long, written in great detail to make sure you map out a clear path, or it can be as simple as saying, I will not spend more than 30mins in the bathroom.

The idea is to create rules to control how you do the little things in your daily life to get you closer to a long-term goal you wish to achieve.

For example, if you want to shed a bit of fat but do not have time for intense daily workouts, a simple rule that you can create for yourself could be, I will jump rope for 10 mins every day before taking my evening shower.

2

Have a Task of the day for each day of the week.

I see a great reward from having a general knowledge of what I need to be focusing on each day of the week. Then I use that main task to decide on smaller tasks for the day.

For example, on Sundays, my task is to plan and prepare for the upcoming week. Hence on that day, I meal-plan, shop for groceries, pick out five work outfits, clean and organize my home, take a shave, etc.

On Mondays, I write. On Tuesdays, I edit, and so on.

Instead of doing a little of everything all in one day, I like to group my tasks and work on a different group each day.

3

Create daily meal Themes.

Same as having a task of the day or a theme of the day.

Create meal themes that will lessen the burden of deciding on what to cook or eat.

It is about eliminating the need to make the same decisions repeatedly. Instead, you have a general idea of what you will be eating and when. The only thing that changes is the recipes.

Here are my weekly meal themes:

Dinner

• Monday- rice and stew/ curry
• Tuesday- Pasta
• Wednesday- Burritos, wraps, or tacos.
• Thursday- soups
• Friday- Roti with vegetables
• Saturday- Juice Detox
• Sunday- Fun meal (Eat out or recreate a restaurant meal)

Lunch– Previous Dinner Leftovers

Breakfast- coffee with oats, cereal, bread, etc.

Having this written down and stuck to a surface somewhere in your kitchen can help you to create more time in your workday by:

• Reducing time spent on figuring out what to eat each day
• You can prepare meals ahead of time because you already know what is next on the menu.
• You can cook larger meals and freeze half for the next time this theme comes around. That is a whole week apart before you eat the same thing again.

If you make use of this, some days you would not need to cook at all.

You can also use this strategy to keep up with your healthy eating goals on busy workdays.

5

Use a calendar to map out your day.

For a long time, mapping out my day hour by hour seemed odd. I could not understand how others did it.

But I knew that I wanted to be more efficient with my time. Yet every time I researched how other people do it, I learned that they used a calendar. I just needed to find my way of doing it.

There is more than one way to plan your day using a calendar besides doing it hour by hour.

You can practice block scheduling, which is easier and perfect for anyone who wants to be more efficient with their time but without the pressure to complete a task within a specific hour.

Block scheduling is concerned with having a routine. How much you get done within that time is up to you.

For example,

You might have a morning routine that starts at wake-up time and ends at 10 am. During this time, you can do all the things that help you to feel prepared for the day, such as;

• Exercise
• Shower
• Brush your teeth
• Eat breakfast
• Feed your pets
• Write your journal, etc.

All you need to do is wake up early enough to get your morning routine out of the way. The more time that you have available before 10 am, the more productive your day will be.

If you wake up after 10 am, then your morning routine is being pushed into the time when you were supposed to be doing something else and will inevitably mess up your day.

When you create your schedule block, you can make the routine as long or as limited in time as you would like. But having this in place helps you physically see how you spend your time and where change is needed.

If you are interested, my workday routine looks like this;

• 7:30 am to 10 am – Morning routine
• 10 am to 4 pm- Intentional living (here I work on my task/s of the day)
• 4 pm to 7 pm- Free time. I use this block to fit in anything I want to do.
• 7 pm to 11 pm- Evening routine. Includes dinner time, shower, hang out with family, etc.

You can customize this whole thing to match your lifestyle. The only thing I will say is to try to have morning and evening time blocks. But they can start and end at any time you wish.

Bonus Tip

Make use of your Phone home screen!

In this century, almost everyone owns a smartphone and carries it around everywhere. It’s like having a personal assistant on the go.

Well, here is what.

With the rules you created for yourself, go on Instagram, and use the photo editor to upload an image of your choice, add the rules as text to it and save it to your phone instead of sharing it. Then use that image as your home screen wallpaper.

Every time you unlock your phone, you will have a constant reminder of what you need to do.

Better yet, many phones allow you to create notes and pin them to your screen as widgets.

Instead of having apps displayed on the home screen, move those over and pin a few notes widgets with the rules you created for yourself, your meal themes, and your daily task themes. That way, it is easily accessible to you when you need a reminder of what you should be working on today.

I hope that I was able to explain each point so that you will understand. I feel like I have been quite wordy with this blog post but that is just the way it is sometimes when you want to convey a message as efficiently as possible.

I am passionate about creating more time in my workday because it helps me tremendously with feeling accomplished at the end of each day. I like knowing that I am putting in at least an hour each day to work on my goals.

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