Time Management

I’ve been wondering where all my time has been disappearing to. Things are not crazy-busy at work right now. I am not training for an Ironman this year. I am settled into my new apartment and haven’t spent a lot of time furtniture shopping. I haven’t been travelling a lot.Where has all my time gone? I think everyone would love to have a few extra hours in their day. If not per day, how about a couple extra days per month to go on a vacation?

Time management is an incredibly powerful skill, yet something we are often so bad at. Unlike overeating, which has the unpleasant and fairly obvious side-affect of gaining weight and feeling like crap, poorly managing your time creeps up on you much more slowly. It is also the sort of thing where you can stay in denial for years. Everyone wants to think they are a hard and “smart” worker, and that as an adult they are disciplined. Surely, it is of no fault of our own that there are only 24 instead of 30 hours in a day!

I’m going to find my missing time. I want it back. Whoever stole it is going to pay!!!! But where to start?

I decided to start with taking an inventory of where I spend my time. I just did a simple spreadsheet estimating where I think my hours are spent in a typical week. The point is to set a standard so I know which areas I should focus on improving. The pie chart at the beginning of this post tells the story.
From this point, I can start thinking about where to save time. As expected, I spend a ton of time each day sleeping and working. If I could sleep less and work more efficiently, I would get a lot time back. I also spend a lot of time eating. I love to eat so I really don’t feel like futzing too much trying to shave hours there.

I also spend a lot of time on the Internet when I am home. Since I don’t watch TV stations (just movies on DVD!), this is my daily entertainment. Most of the time right now is spent blogging and on online forums, both of which I enjoy, so I don’t want to pare that back much either.

I do spend a fair amount of time commuting. Perhaps I should take the bus more often and read on the way? This could free up the 3% of time I spend reading at home. Score!

Exercising is something I need to do more of, not less of. However, I am sure that I could be more effective in the way I weight train. Perhaps I could shorten my weight workouts from 80 minutes to 40 minutes? Need to look into some new techniques to apply here.

Fun and TV are important to me, so I am not going to cut these back!

So given this quick analysis, I see a promising plan to get my hard-earned time back. Here’s what I will be doing:

• Researching ways to sleep less while keeping my energy levels high
• Figuring out how to get more done at work in shorter periods of time
• Make my commute more effective by taking the bus so I can read along the way (perhaps doing books on tape if I drive)
• Identifying ways to get a great weight workout in, in as short a time period as possible

I’ll blog my progress.