Poor grammar, but good thought: make better use of our time. One of the areas where we strive to spend time is on our own needs. Yet we seem to leave this time allocation for last, often never achieving it. "If we only had an extra ten minutes" we could do something nice for ourselves we think as we slip into bed, exhausted and spent at the end of a day.
Only twenty-four hours are in a day-no more, no less. There is no such thing as an extra ten minutes. Therefore, if we are to find time for ourselves we must make time for ourselves. Where in our hectic schedules can we make time that we can then allocate for ourselves? Try these ten solutions to "buy some time" in your day.
Group chores, errands, or tasks together so that you accomplish them in the same physical effort rather than make multiple "rounds" to accomplish them. For example, gather together everything that needs to be taken to the basement and make one trip downstairs when all that can be carried has been accumulated. I keep an empty copier paper box at the top step, behind the basement door, and place the sundry items I intend to take downstairs in the box. When the box is full I finally make one trip downstairs and distribute everything to their respective homes. This saves me multiple trips that I used to take downstairs every time I had something that went to the basement. If your basement steps are open and no door separates the basement from the rest of the house, substitute the copier box with a nice basket.
When I run errands I group them so that I accomplish as many as possible in one loop from home back to home. Since my business is near my home I combine personal and business errands in the loop. One circular loop allows me to cover the storage locker, delivery or pickup from a friend who works nearby, gas for the car, the ATM at the bank, groceries, the business mail box, a drugstore (drive-through window), the liquor store, the US Post Office, the local hardware store, (unfortunately for traffic density in our small suburban neighborhood) a new WalMart, and the county library. I save plenty of minutes´ back-and-forth with a well-planned route for my errands.
Monitor the telephone. Many people dislike caller-ID and answering machines when they are the callers. Consider the source. As the potential receiver of the call you get tied up for minutes with unwanted and unsolicited calls throughout the day. I am amazed by how many times my telephone rings throughout the day when I am home. I am amazed because I am usually not supposed to be home during the day. Therefore, I know that practically all the calls to my home throughout the day are calls that either I did not solicit or messages that can be left on my answering machine. I save many minutes monitoring my incoming calls and answering only those important to me at any particular time.
Read less and read smarter. If you are like me you relish information and take in magazine subscriptions and newspapers as though you were opening your own private newsstand. I found myself overwhelmed with publications that I felt I had to read. Of course getting through them all took time.
Cancel some of those subscriptions. Decide which two specialty magazines provide the overall coverage you need and cancel the other three similar subscriptions. Analyze which of the three newspapers gives you the perspective you most seek and cancel the other two. If you just have to have the daily New York Times for business or investment purposes and you also listen to or watch your local evening news, then consider subscribing only to the Sunday edition of your local newspaper. Do you receive four different travel-related or hobby-related magazines? Determine which one or two of them gives you the most-relevant coverage and get rid of the others. You can always get targeted information from the library or off the World Wide Web when you really need it.
Schedule with the doctor, dentist, vet, or automobile technician for the first appointment in the day. You get serviced and get out faster as the first appointment of the day before interruptions, emergencies, and longer-then-expected previous appointments intrude.
Multitask. This is a term familiar to computer experts in that computer operating systems (like Windows) appear to run multiple tasks, or programs, at the same time. Perform multiple tasks around the house or at work at the same time.
For example, at home I fill the dish washing tub (no, I don´t have an automatic dishwasher) with hot water and soap and put in the dishes to let them soak. While they are soaking I load the first load of laundry into the washing machine and start the machine. I probably took the box of things-that-go-to-the-basement downstairs with me enroute to the laundry room and distributed items along the path to the machines. I pull new paper towel and toiler paper packages from the pantry enroute to upstairs and put them in their respective cabinets. On the way back to the kitchen I turn on the desktop computer to allow it to go through its startup routine (which takes many minutes). I pick up the portable phone on the way back to the sink and make a phone call with the phone tucked under my neck while I begin washing dishes (I´m thinking of getting a headphone set for the phone to make this task easier). You get the drift. There are things that can be done at the same time, especially with automation and machines that run on their own once you start them or set them on timers.
At work while I am on the phone I sort mail or go through my E-mail. While waiting for a package delivery I know has arrived in the building and is enroute up the elevator, I go get a cup of coffee and stop by the mail slot to pick up my mail.
Establish a process to handle the mail through one complete cycle. Bring the mail from the mailbox. Open all the envelopes with an opener. Set imaginary boundaries around you for where you will stack each item you handle. Pull the contents of the first envelope. Junk mail? Put it in the area you designate as "throw away immediately". Pull the contents of the second envelope. A bill? Put it in the "bills" area. Continue with the rest of the mail in your stack. You should end up with multiple piles with multiple items in each pile (especially if you are a homeowner or business owner to whom many pieces of mail are sent on a daily basis.) Gather together each stack and distribute them to their respective homes in one circle around the house. The "throw away immediately" pile goes directly to the trash can in the kitchen. The "bills" pile goes directly to the folder that you pull once a week to pay the bills. The "read and discard" pile goes to the spot on the couch where I read the paper and other informational items and then discard (or recycle) them. The "I´m not sure ... I´ll keep these until later" pile goes, well, that´s an issue for an organization expert to write about!
Answer E-mail messages that have questions asked of you by highlighting the questions, selecting "reply", then inserting your answers after each question on the reply E-mail. Highlighting the questions and selecting "reply" creates a new E-mail note with the highlighted words already inserted in the news E-mail. This works for most major E-mail services. Doing this saves you the time it takes to create a new note, look up the address of the recipient, and type a note or cut-and-paste the question.
Business meetings are more likely to end on time when they are held just before lunch and just before quitting time. In the flexible work world the delineation of lunchtime and quitting time is fuzzy as everyone´s work time varies. Create a specific lunchtime by calling in a pizza delivery service for delivery at a certain time. The meeting is disrupted when the food arrives so the goal is to end the meeting at the scheduled delivery time. If a status report or internal broadcast is scheduled for 4:00PM, schedule your meeting for 3:00PM so that it ends when the scheduled event begins.
Those evening civic and social meetings are a bit more difficult to control but can be effectively controlled with a few tricks. Begin the meeting at 7:00PM. This allows those who need to ferry a sitter or wait for their partner to get home from rush-hour traffic to arrive. Brain cells usually deteriorate after 9:00PM so the meeting will most-likely end at 9:00PM. Following good meeting facilitation techniques also helps keep meetings limited to only when they are needed and within specified time frames.
Get a doggie bag. When you eat out (or order delivery), eat half of the meal and ask for a take-home container for the rest of the meal. You have another meal for another day that only requires reheating in a microwave or toaster oven. This saves you the time-and expense-of cooking at least one meal or stopping at a take-out vendor. It also helps with weight control.
Stop. Just stop after an hour of doing what you are doing and take a break. Walk away from the task and get a glass of water. Stretch, roll your head around and shrug your shoulders to loosen them, and look out a window or walk onto the back deck for a few minutes. You return to the task refreshed, which helps give you a new outlook on the task and renewed energy to continue the task. You also drink an additional glass of water, which is healthy. And you relieve stress from your body, which is also healthy. Now, back to the premise at the beginning of this article ... if we only had ten extra minutes we could do something for ourselves. Follow one or more of the ten solutions above and you will find more than those ten minutes in your day to do something else. Make sure that something else is something f or yourself. What that something else could be is the subject of a different article!