3 Mistakes You Make in Your Spare Time That Hinder You From Making It 10x More Valuable

My friends think I have no free time.

The truth is, I have found a few tactics to optimize it and get more out of it by needing less time. A mind-shift to see my time as a valuable resource made me feel it ten times more intense than having ten times more time. Nobody gives you something valuable for free, so why should you treat it like being worth nothing?

You either have a lot of it - it is worth nothing to you - or you haven't discovered the right tactics to avoid spending it wastefully.

1. Wasting Your Time Won't Bring You Anything except Bad Feelings

Feeling bad is a choice.

Sometimes you can't help it, but wasting your time is an actual task you decided to do - you can help it. You choose to get up late and waste the entire morning.

Instead, you could have enjoyed it with a big breakfast and a hot coffee watching the morning sun. I am not talking about being productive in the morning, I also don't like to be. Actually, enjoying the mornings with pleasure time for myself is a great reason to get up a little bit earlier, even on Saturdays and Sundays. This time makes you ready for the day by feeling already saturated. You don't yearn for the end of your shift because you've already had a great time before.

You decide to waste your time by not spending it. Imagine how great it must be to get to work after fulfilling your desires, as I do before I start working. Imagine drinking your coffee with your family in peace or watching the new upload of your favorite YouTube channel before going to work.

Bad feelings happen whenever you decide not to take action and be responsible for your time, the little things like getting up 30 minutes earlier to actively enjoy the morning make your life worthwhile.

2. It Is Your Free Time, but You Don't Own It Completely

Free time is measured before taxes.

Only because it is your free time doesn't mean it also belongs entirely to you. You will always have to do things to serve others or don't want to, such as cleaning the flat, taking out the trash, feeding the baby, buying new clothes, etc.

Think of a simple task like emptying the dishwasher. It might be irrelevant to you and probably takes 2 minutes more doing it unoptimized, but as I develop software that has to be compiled (comparable to emptying the dishwasher), these 2 minutes add up over time. Simply deciding about the order of emptying beforehand will save you 2 minutes every time. Count now how often the dishwasher runs at your place - mine just finished while I was writing this article.

This was only an example, but you have multiple tasks in your life to spend thinking about how to do it beforehand. Developing software is some kind of human processes optimization, touching one thing and optimizing anything that crosses your way to leave it better than you've found it. This ultimately means finding combinable tasks for your daily life, for example, bringing out the trash, then refueling the car, and then going and getting groceries all in one tour.

What you want to achieve is to build packages of tasks that can be combined to save time, otherwise, you will waste it.

3. Free Time Doesn't Mean You Are Freed From Thinking

People leave their workplaces and instantly turn dumb.

At work, they are efficient machines, and once they leave the door, they behave like they own all resources on this planet. If you work to live in your free time, that's a totally fine lifestyle but isn't it precisely this time the best you've got?

I'd never seen a person who acted carelessly and had the best time of their life. I wasted so much time during my teenage years, and when I think back, it makes me feel angry because I could have been so much further in life. Level up your leisure time by thinking about what you genuinely enjoy. Why should you just turn on the TV and let others control your time if you own it?

Listen to yourself and find activities you enjoy the most to value this resource. Working 40h a week as a freelancer, writing articles, designing courses for Udemy are things I enjoy, they give back more than acting recklessly ever could. Value your free time by investing, the return on investment is quality over quantity.

Listen to your inner self and decide on activities that you enjoy the most to get the best out of the few hours you got, and no, you don't have to skip wasting time entirely, I also do this daily, but significantly less than before.

Free time is a scarce resource, it is far more important to treat it respectfully and take it instead of being given by others. Make it your personal valuable resource and own it.

Only because you are done with work doesn't mean there aren't more tasks waiting for you, combining and thinking about how to reward yourself with a fulfilling activity makes you get the most out of less time.

Make yourself some personal free time cloud nines.