Effective Management of Your 168 HRs

If you feel like you don't have enough time for everything, then chances are you're not making the best use of your time. With the new year resolution season upon us, many of us are boldly trying to fulfill goals to “manage time better,” “be more productive,” and “focus on what matters.” So how do we become better time managers of our lives? This is where Laura Vanderkam comes in. I recently heard a podcast where she discussed the principles in her book titled 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. Now, before you brush this off as just another strategy of creating lists, let me highlight some takeaways that have changed the way I view time.

Mastering Time

“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year – and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!” Tony Robbins  

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Planning, Prioritizing and Performing

When you want to improve your time-management skills, there are many areas to look at. You can begin by understanding how you currently use the time you have. Next you can identify bad habits and then you can learn the tools to change these habits. The reason Vanderkam uses the 168 hours figure is focusing on a twenty-four time span is just too short an amount of time to accomplish all our goals. The biggest exercise in the book is to actually track your hours for a full week. What if we could sleep eight hours a night, exercise five days a week, and learn how to play the piano without sacrificing work, family time, or any other activity that is important to us? If we re-examine our weekly allotment of 168 hours, we’ll find that with a little reorganization and prioritizing we can master our time. Here are a few tips and techniques you can apply to get more done and feel more productive:

• Time Tracking: To manage time effectively, you have to first understand HOW you spend the 168 hours that make a week. The reality is that most of us have no idea how we are spending our limited time. Think of yourself as an attorney billing your time to different projects. She provides a free template you can use until you find your system, whether an app or like me paper and pen. Keep the spreadsheet with you. If you forget to record what you’re doing for a while, just approximate the time later. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
  

• Grade Your Time: Many things compete for our attention: urgent personal emails, phone calls, social media updates, and more. It’s way easier to get distracted and fall for immediate tasks that don’t help us in the long run. With the 56 hours of time we are not sleeping or working, what goals did you want to achieve and were you honest about prioritizing them? 
  

• Re-engineer your Schedule: Once you have a rough idea of how much time recurring activities in your life command–sleep, bath, cook, eat, play with kids, commute, groceries–you can reverse design your week by blocking off those times in your calendar so that you know when and where you are already booked.
  

• Reducing Time on Activities: Streamline your schedule by either cutting out activities or by effectively re-organizing your schedule to save time. Would it be better to restrict online shopping if you waste a ton of time browsing instead of buying? Eradicate or restrict activities that make you use your time ineffectively.
  

• What Really Matters: At the end of the exercise you will very likely find that you are spending a lot less time than you would like on what is most important to you, and you are in fact wasting a lot of time on things which are meaningless to you. This time management style provides you with a bird's eye view to determine which tasks and activities are worthy of our precious time and determine our core competencies, values, goals, and sources of happiness.
  

If you’re starting your own business, or are looking to grow as an entrepreneur, you have to look at the time you have in your 168hrs and use time wisely. Every day you will unexpectedly find yourself in an unavoidable situation that encroaches upon your precious time. We all have the same time, that means 7 days a week, which means 168 hours a week, no more no less.  Take a pen and start listing all the decisions you make every day, structure your time so you can do much more important things in your life.

Thanks for reading, 

Joe