How to Find More Time: 4 Simple Life Hacks to Give Yourself More Time

We don’t have enough time. We never have enough time. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. This isn’t a tired old cliche. Half of the population say they don’t have enough time to do the things they want in life, weighed down by commitments like work, family ties, commuting and chores.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the young who feel the pressure of time the most. The majority of people in their 20s feel as though their time is being stolen away from the things that really drive them. The things they really want to do.

We need more time in our lives, but how do we find it? Is there a secret to amazing time and calendar management or are we just doomed to struggle? Here are some tips:

Plan Your Time

It might seem counter-intuitive, but investing time in planning can be hugely beneficial for saving time later on. While you may think that it’s better to just get on with it, rather than using what little free time you have to organize your schedule, there are major benefits to the practice.

It is thought that for every minute you plan, you can save around 10 minutes. This means if you spend just 10-15 minutes planning your day, theoretically, you could reclaim two hours of time you’d have lost without it. How is this possible?

In practice, the amount of time you can save by planning varies, but the benefits are clear. By thinking about how you carry out your day-to-day tasks, you can look at ways to improve the efficiency at which you do them. Whether it’s planning a better travel route, meeting two friends at the same time instead of one in the morning and one in the afternoon, or finding ways to get your work done more effectively, planning really does have benefits for saving time.

Eliminate the Unnecessary

Busy people often suffer from the same problem: they waste a lot of time.

When you have no time, it somehow becomes even easier to lose it to activities you have no real interest in. We often find ourselves unwittingly soaking up hours on things we don’t enjoy or care about. A great example of this is the idea of brain-dead social scanning. The average person spends over two hours a day scrolling through their social feeds and messaging apps unnecessarily. Why? Because it’s easy just to let yourself get caught in the mindlessness of it all, especially when you’ve got other things to think about. Social media is, in effect, modern escapism.

But this isn’t the only way you can lose time unnecessarily. There are likely many activities and events in your life that you are sinking time into that aren’t providing you with the rewards you want. Yet you still do them. From volunteering for causes you aren’t interested in to adding on extra working hours when you’ve got other things you’d rather be doing, we’re all guilty of committing ourselves to tasks that don’t give us the satisfying life experiences we actually crave.

The key here is to learn to say no.

Say no to social media and remove the tempting apps from your phone. So no to tasks that don’t provide you with enjoyment or enrichment. Say no to routines that aren’t helping you make the most of the time you have. Say no to people asking for your time when you’ve already got enough on your plate. Optimise your time to fill it with things that you want to do or, at least, things that matter to you.

Hire a Home Cleaner

Day-to-day chores absorb a lot of time. The average Brit spends at least five hours a week cleaning their home, with 31% of people allocating as many as 10 hours or more. But that’s not even the worst of it. 1 in 10 of us sinks a colossal 15 hours per week into cleaning. That’s effectively a month a year of nothing but straight cleaning.

We’re losing huge amounts of time to tidying up.

However, there is a way to reclaim this time. Hiring a home cleaner enables you to take back those hours lost. A professional cleaning service can keep your home clean and tidy without you having to lift a finger. While your hired cleaners work, you can put your time into the activities you really want to enjoy, like spending time with friends, perusing sports or doing new hobbies.

The added benefit of hiring a professional cleaner is that, thanks to their expertise and high-quality equipment, they’ll keep your home cleaner for longer. The result is that your home requires less frequent cleaning and your living space is generally a more pleasant space to inhabit.

Take Advantage of Technology

Technology can be a powerful time-saving tool. It doesn’t often save you massive amounts in one go, but it can shave a few minutes off different activities. Combined, over days and weeks, this can add up. But what kind of technological tools are we talking about?

Mobile apps can be valuable resources for saving time. Technology like banking apps let you do things like pay bills on the go. This means you could be handling mundane tasks while you are walking to work, for example, instead of having to sit down and make it a job that takes time later in the day. Likewise, you can use technology to consolidate your leisure activities. A fan of working out and reading? eReaders and audiobooks can help you enjoy both pastimes at once, allowing you to get an hour-long workout in at the same time as getting an hour deeper into your favourite novel.

If you really want to save time, though, you can look to even more advanced technological solutions.

Automation and smart technology can act as your own personal hospitality service; managing many aspects of your life for you. There are countless ways smart tech can save you time, including using voice dictation to send messages like emails and texts while performing other tasks and having software track your groceries and order food when you’re running low.

Featured Image by Mike from Pexels

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Rohit Raina

A writer by chance and leisurely on his way to become a writer by choice, Rohit is either ranting his ire out or talking about the most irrelevant stuff around.