How to Spend Your Time the Right Way

Time is a precious commodity. It's something none of us can get back once it's gone, and the way we spend our time has a huge impact on the quality of our lives and our accomplishments.

Work hard, play hard we're often told. And like every generation before us, we're working harder and longer hours than any before us. But is that really the right way to spend our time? Am I spending my time the right way?

There are only so many hours in a day, and they're precious. We live in a time when it is easy to be distracted by a million things going on around us.

The biggest challenge people have today is time management. An average person has so much to take care of in a day. You need to sleep, wake up, prepare yourself for the office, by this point it's already 8:00. You need to go to work, do your work, prepare for presentations and team meetings, eat dinner, return home and spend some time with your family. You need to sleep at night.

It's easy to lose track of where your time goes. This is especially relevant if you want to take control over your productivity in order to become more productive. Once we understand how we spend our time, we can get better at spending it the way we like.

There is never enough time to do things we have to do. We've all had moments when we wished we could clone ourselves so that we can get multiple things done at the same time. In these moments, it's easy to forget that scheduling your time correctly is the foundation upon which everything else in your life is built.

Everyone is looking for more time. We all want to finish our to-do list, read all the books in our personal library and watch the series we started watching on Netflix. While time can't be created, time management skills can help us focus on what's really important to us and make the most of every moment.

In the age of information, it's easy to be distracted. You can watch TV, surf the internet, or talk with your friends and never get any work done.

Whether we're chatting with friends and family on WhatsApp or answering numerous emails, the temptation to let other people steal our time is ever-present, if not constant. But there are essential things we have to do for ourselves as well as for others—we have responsibilities that, if not met, will leave a gap in our own lives as well as those of others.

The best way to spend your time is on what matters to you. This is why the most successful people are those who do what they love. They take the time to figure out what they love, and they spend their time on it.

How do you decide what to work on? In order to make the right choices, you have to know what matters.

Assess where your time goes

Take a week to document every single activity in which you engage during waking hours: everything from eating breakfast to checking Facebook to watching tv to taking the bus home. Record it all and then at the end of the week, categorize each activity as productive or non-productive and see how much time is actually being spent on things that matter to you.

If you've never done this before, get ready for some insights. You may be surprised at how many things you think you have to do every day aren't really necessary at all.

Write down your goals

What do you want to accomplish with your time? Write down all of your personal, professional and relationship goals. This will help you figure out what kind of lifestyle changes are needed to achieve them all—and also if it's even possible for one person to do it all!

Look at that list and ask yourself: Is each of these things something I actually have to do? Or can some of them be eliminated from my day? Maybe you don't really have to spend 45 minutes checking email every morning or spend an hour watching TV after work each night. It may be possible for you to cut back on these tasks without sacrificing anything

Schedule everything

Meetings, marketing, coffee with a client, family dinner—whatever it is, put it in your calendar. Schedule those appointments with yourself in the same way you would schedule them with others.

Once you’ve identified your goals, figure out which days of the week/month it makes sense to work on them. Then, create a calendar or planner for those times so that you’re able to stay consistent with this process.

Treat yourself like you would one of your friends: if you were trying to help her meet her goal, what would you tell her? Keep yourself accountable by setting reminders, inviting someone along for the ride (after all, accountability buddies are a real thing!), and committing fully to your plan

Stop multitasking

You can get more done if you focus on one task at a time.

Multitasking can actually be detrimental to your productivity. When you try and do two things at once, it takes your brain longer to shift from one task to another. That means it takes longer for you to get back into focus after a distraction, whether that's a phone call or an email. And it also means it takes more mental energy for you to keep track of what needs to be done for each task—and when it needs to be done.

Multitasking has been proven to be a myth. You're not doing two (or more) things at once; you're actually just switching between tasks really fast.

Why is this a bad thing? Well, it turns out that the brain takes time to adjust itself to a new task, and when you switch back and forth constantly, your brain never fully adapts to what it's doing. You end up taking longer than if you had just done one thing at a time.

As humans, we are capable of focusing on one thing at a time. It's not natural for us to shift rapidly between tasks, and in this way, multitasking is actually self-sabotaging. If you're trying to get more done by doing more at once, you're setting yourself up for failure.

Let's say you're talking on the phone to a client and checking e-mail at the same time. You're switching your attention from listening carefully to your client to reading an e-mail from another client, then back again. Then, while you're still on the phone with one client, someone pops in and asks for a favour or something else that diverts your attention from what you were doing before. You're constantly switching focus from one thing to another, which is hard enough in itself, but also exhausting on top of that.

I've been a big fan of blocking off time and dedicating it to a single task. To only respond to/check on emails once every three hours or so, for example. I know people who schedule every 15/30 minutes of their day and dedicate it to some task (working out, planning the day, etc.).

When you focus on one task at a time, then take a break (and no, not checking your email counts as a break), your brain has the chance to recharge and focus on the next task at hand. Multitasking means never really being able to recharge because you never really stop focusing on one thing at a time—you're just constantly switching between them.

If you want to get stuff done faster, ditch the multi-task mindset and get into the flow—you know, one task at a time. You'll thank yourself later.

Getting better at managing my time is always a priority. But really, I think you should try different things until you find what works best for you.