What’s Gotta Stay

Making a change in your life can be difficult. By nature, many of us are creatures of habit, and therefore we resist change. The “natural man” is one that falls into habits that are the easiest to do each day. We all have huge potential to do more than we are doing each day; yet, many of us simply drift through life each day, going through the motions of what each day requires of us. That is not to say we are not busy, but are we busy doing what we feel is most important?

Make or Keep an Activity Log

First, take a look at a snapshot of your last week. If it is too difficult to remember exactly what you did for the last week, keep a paper or notebook for the next week and write a log throughout the day or at the end of each day of exactly what you are doing with your day. Be detailed, and don’t cheat yourself by skipping over your less than productive times during the day. Include every hour of the day, from when you first wake up to when you finally shut your eyes and go to sleep.

For some it may be easier to write out what you have done by hour or half hour, so you may choose to use a day planner or to create a page using Excel or another spreadsheet program, listing out the times in one column and leaving space to write in another. For others a simple list is easier. Do whatever works for you.

Look for your Unproductive and Times

Once you have a complete week compiled, now you are ready to evaluate how you use your time. If you did the first exercise honestly, you will undoubtedly find pockets of time that you regularly are not getting the most out of your day. You may choose to first focus on your workday, or perhaps first on your evenings; it is completely up to you. These pockets of time will likely show in a pattern revealing some habits you can correct. You may find these are only 15 or 30 minutes here and there, but these wasted minutes add up! You may even find that you are regularly watching the evening news for an hour, but letting that spill into several hours of TV watching every night! At work this may be the regular 15 minute breaks that turn into 30 or 45 minutes before you get into a productive workflow again, or even more common, the online reading and chatting you may do throughout the day.

Evaulate Your Time Usage

If you are to rank your productive hours out of your waking day, where would you stand? Take the numbers of hours you are completely productive and divide it by how many hours you are awake during the day. For example, if I add up all the hours I feel are realistically productive, including work (subtracting lunch and break times), time spent in family activities (yes, this is productive as long as it isn’t just watching TV), exercising at the gym, making meals, required shopping, etc., it may be 11 hours in the day. If I rise at 6 am and go to sleep at 10 pm, in an ideal day, that is 16 hours of waking time. Eleven divided by 16 is 0.6875, or approximately 69%. On a regular grading letter system that is a D+! And here I thought I was doing fairly well!

Be Reasonable

Before we go on, my first bit of advice is to be reasonable. If we are always going at 100% throughout the day, we will burn ourselves out. Breaks are built into the workday for a reason, and we all work hard to allow ourselves times of leisure. That said, we also need to be honest with ourselves and find where we are simply wasting time for the sake of not doing anything else. How much is that TV time contributing to our day? How about all that time surfing the ‘net after we have read everything interesting on our “regular” sites? If you are an avid reader, do you limit your time or at least make sure you are not spending all your reading time with “brainless” novels? Do you find you have many “filler” activities you do throughout your workday that amount to nothing?

By taking an honest look at an entire week, we can see that generally we are likely letting many more hours than we realize get wasted.

Pick a Wasted Time and Replace it with Something Productive

Take a look at your average day and pick a time or type of activity you are wasting time with on a regular basis. Depending on what time you have picked, this may be during the workday, in the morning at home or perhaps the evening time to yourself. Now pick an appropriate activity you should or can be doing that time. Make a sign of what you would like to do and post it where you will see it during that time. If you work on a computer, put a sticky note on the side of your monitor with a simple one or few word reminder. At home, it may be on the edge of your TV, refrigerator or mirror. Keep it there for a week and stick to your goal. Once you have mastered doing more with that particular activity, pick another, and then another until you have developed a positive habit that keeps that block of time productive.

Make the Change in Steps

Don’t try to change your productivity level all at once. If you try to go from 50% productivity to 90% overnight, you will quickly become overwhelmed and likely drop back into your old ways. Stick with correcting one habitually unproductive block of time until you have it licked. It’s like the old adage “You can’t eat an elephant all at once, you have to do it one bit at a time.” You have to stay committed through the process to make a real change, but you can do it if you have the desire and follow through.

Keep a Log

Just like when you first were identifying unproductive time spent, keep a log of your time usage throughout the time when you are making improvements. At the end of each day, evaluate how you did that day and make your goals for the next. By actively evaluating your efforts and progress, you will be amazed at the improvement in your productivity.

Get Started Now!

There is no time like the present to get started on this positive change. Best of all, as you become more productive, you will be amazed at the positive feeling of accomplishment this gives you. As you look back on how you previously spent your time, you will shake your head at the time wasted that you can never get back. Time is the one thing you can only spend, you can never save it for another day.