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How to increase my educosoft time?

What hacks and tips can I adopt to increase the amount of usable time I have at my disposal?

  • I am 31 ones years old and I find that my life is so busy my to-do list grows longer and longer each week until I end up culling the things I want to do, purely to focus on those that I have to do. First off, here's my statement-of-affairs (as it were). On a personal level, I'm married with two young children: one newborn and one just under two. My wife looks after the children during the week, but I take them for one day (which I love) to give her some respite. On a professional level, I'm a busy man. It's probably easier to talk about my work in reverse order. As a part-time job I compere and host professional networking events on average twice a month. These take place in the evening from 6pm to 10pm, although they take some setting up and so for at least 2 weekday evenings a month I won't achieve much else. By day, I have two jobs. My first job is as to the co-founder of a startup. I get paid (a bit) for this role. In reality, it's a full-time job but I aim to commit 2 full-day days a week to it, along with a further day fitting in 'around the edges'. I could easily make it a 5 (or 7!) days-a-week role but financial circumstances mean that I have to earn money elsewhere until the business grows further. My second job is that I offer my expertise in a consultancy capacity. I have a long-term contract for which I work around 1 - 2 days per week on average. Some weeks it's 3 days, other works it might only be half a day. With all of the above day jobs there is flexibility; I can work whenever and wherever I want. The caveat is that I work from home and my wife and family ask for and receive a lot of my support. This means that I tend to clock off work at 5pm and begin at 9am. Around this, my hands are full supporting my wife with our children. Around the above I tend to fill-up any spare time with projects on http://peopleperhour.com, to bring in a little supplementary income here and there. I get absolutely no personal time to myself, other than the time spent with my family. By the time the kids are in bed and asleep and I have cooked dinner it is 9pm and I'm so tired that I go to bed! I go out socially (with my friends) around 6 nights a year. Specifically, I'm looking for tips and hacks to try and INCREASE the amount of time I have available. I think I'm fairly productive with the time that I have. Switching between roles is tough.

  • Answer:

    You nailed it at the end. The productivity cost of switching between roles is very high. While multi tasking is possible, the activities which lend themselves to multitasking are pretty specific to things that use different parts of the brain (such as driving while listening to a book or reading emails while on a treadmill). When taking on new tasks and roles, please realize the productivity hit you will take to keep expectations realistic. The second thing is you may have maxed out your productivity based on how much you are already doing. You have in essence 3 jobs plus a young family when they are at their most time and energy intensive. No wonder you have no time for yourself!! As another entrepreneur, I get the drive to do more, better, faster cheaper. Problem? Work HARDER! Do MORE! I, however, realized that to increase my productivity, I need to do LESS and spend at least 5% of my time on self care. A coach calls this "sharpening the saw". If I maximize my productivity, this looks like increasing my output (and returning higher value) and reduce my time/energy expended! I can only do this if I have a rested brain and I am feeling positive. Self care, hobbies, date night, family time, friends, reading books, entertainment, all of these help sharpen the saw. But we forget about self care when we get overwhelmed. So put yourself on the list of important business tasks.

Siobhan Green at Quora Visit the source

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The main ‘myth’ about time management is the fact that the time used up in ‘managing’ is ironic. SO the most important distinction on managing it is the fact which task is of priority to you and which is actually not.Some tools prove helpful in this regard as well.Too often, productivity tools try to make us more 'productive' by making us tick as many tasks as possible. Instead WEEK PLAN will help you keep your goals in mind so that you can work more effectively. It is not the number of tasks you complete that matters, it is what tasks you choose to complete. An introduction to the 4 QuadrantsAll tasks fall into one of the following four categories: People who spend most of their time in Quadrant I usually have stressful lives. What they need to do is both important and urgent. They have to respond to tight deadlines, they need to solve crisis and have to put out fires constantly.People who spend most of their time in Quadrant III usually have a short term focus. They feel out of control.The Quadrant IV is all about time wasters or activities that don't provide any value. Anything done abusively could enter this category too (TV, video games, internet surfing...).Quadrant II is THE quadrant where you want to spend more time. It is the quadrant of planning, preparation, balance and proactivity It can help you reduce the time you spend on urgent things overtime.In WEEK PLAN, you can mark a task as urgent and/or important. To categorize a task you can click on the icons next to the task textbox, or you can suffix your task with !1 !2 or !3 where the number corresponds to a quadrant.Exercise: in WEEK PLAN, schedule the tasks you would like to achieve this week and try to categorize them according to the four quadrants.By developing the habit of marking your tasks as urgent/important, you will internalize the concept of categorization and you will be able to differentiate what is truly important to what is only urgent (but not important, Quadrant III).Hope this proves to be helpful. Trello is another app which has made my work seamless. Here is another post I came across.http://lifehacker.com/plan-your-work-week-around-your-energy-level-to-make-th-1752604753

Shivankit Arora

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