There’s one thing in this world that you have a finite amount of, that you can’t just buy, and that’s gone forever when you run out: time.
It’s life’s most precious commodity, and when you look at how little we all get, you really start to think about how you spend yours.
The only way to improve the time you have is to spend as little as possible on the necessary tasks to create more free time to do what you want. Here are 2 secrets that give you more free time…
“Lost time is never found again.” – Benjamin Franklin
Those wise words from Benjamin Franklin simply cannot be denied. Once time is gone, you will never get it back.
That’s why we have to do everything we can to make sure we’re making the most of the time we still have in front of us.
And believe it or not, there’s a secret that help us do just that by limiting the time we spend doing the necessary, mundane tasks that we must while expanding the time we get to spend doing what we want.
So here’s the secret that give us more good time:
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law states that a task will swell in perceived importance as the time allotted for completion decreases.
For instance, do you remember being in high school or college and having a paper due in 2 weeks? With the deadline so far away, you may have decided that doing other homework or even hanging out with friends was a better way to spend your time.
Then, those 2 weeks turn into just 24 hours before the deadline and all of the sudden you find the focus and purpose to complete the paper in one evening (maybe an overnighter).
That’s a simple occurrence- the task only becomes important enough to demand enough of your attention for completion in one night when the time allotted to do so became tiny.
If you had decided right when the paper was assigned that you would only give yourself 24 hours to complete it, you could have finished it the first night and have been done with it.
If you’re at work and are given a week to do a project you could complete in an afternoon, you’ll probably use up the whole week fiddling with unimportant parts of the project that don’t make a difference just because you have the time.
But if you’re given the same project to do in an afternoon, you’d complete it just the same (without unnecessary tinkering) and then have the rest of the week to be productive.
What I’m saying is that you can apply this principle to yourself in order to free up more time that you would otherwise waste on mundane tasks.
Give yourself deadlines- tight ones- and stick to them. Push your limits without going overboard, and see how much time you stop spending on “busy work” and start using to efficiently blow through tasks and then get to the fun time.
If you need some additional help with this, ask yourself what you would do (perhaps during a workday) if you had a meeting with the President in 2 hours that you couldn’t miss and would take up the rest of the day.
That will help you prioritize what you really need to accomplish, and you’ll likely amaze yourself with how much you can get done in that time.
