How To Have More Time: 3 Simple Strategies | 40

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Podcast Description

Ever wish you knew how to have more time in your days? The task load of an online entrepreneur seems to be ever growing, now add that on top of your personal life and possibly a day job too. 

I get it, it’s a lot. And while we can’t get more than 24 hours in a day, we can at least make it feel like we have more time. In this episode, I’m sharing 3 simple strategies that can help. 

Links Referenced in this Episode:

▶ Free quiz: What type of planner are you?

▶ Episode 2: “I don’t have enough time.”

▶ Episode 11: Using Strategic Systems to Reduce Your Overwhelm

▶ Episode 18: How to Use Trello to Organize Your Business

▶ Submit a question or topic for the podcast

Connect with me: 

Website | Instagram

Episode Transcript

(Note: This is a formatted AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through, but is not an optimized blog post. Please excuse any spelling or grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

Episode Intro

Ever wish you knew how to have more time in your days? The task load of online entrepreneurs seems to be ever growing. Now, add that on top of your personal life and possibly a day job too. I get it. It’s a lot. And while we can’t get more than 24 hours in a day, we can at least make it feel like we have more time. And in this episode, I’m sharing three simple strategies that can help. Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

 Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, your host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast, where I’m on a mission to help online entrepreneurs like you focus on all the right things and kiss overwhelm goodbye. Here, you’re going to learn strategies that will boost your productivity so that you can scale your online biz and impact lives sooner. It’s your time to shine so let’s get started!

Personal Update

Hey, hey. Welcome back to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. This summer just flew by. I had every intention to come on and try to record an episode at least every other week, but oh my goodness. My kids were home, like most of the time. And when you get my daughter and my son together, they are like super, super loud.

I’ve tried sending them upstairs to their room and the most quiet I can get them is just a few minutes. So I just didn’t want to risk it because my daughter can scream very high pitched screams and it can like pop your eardrums. I was like, no, you know what? I can’t do this. 

So I can’t believe this summer has already flown by. It is back to school season for us. My kids are now in school and now I finally get some quiet time, but even that has been a transition. My son is in fifth grade now. Oh my gosh. Like where does time go? 

If you have kids and they’re going back to school. I wish everyone a super safe, blessed school year. And I cannot believe how fast time is going by for our babies. My daughter is now in preschool and last week was her first week. So she only went three days last week. She’ll now be going for four days, like half day, and she did fine. She loved it. She absolutely loved going on the days that she went last week. 

But at the time of recording this, it’s Monday and she cried and it broke my heart. So, it’s been, you know, we’re trying to get the hang of things over here on this side of my life. 

But hopefully now with more time back, like, which is the whole subject of today’s topic, right? Like hopefully now with getting a little bit more time back in my own days, then I’ll be able to come back more consistently to the podcast. But anyways, that’s just a little bit of an update on how my life has been going in case you have been listening in for a while and you’re like, Lucy, where have you been? 

3 Simple Strategies on How To Have More Time

And I don’t know about you, but this has definitely been one of those periods in my time where I feel like I wish I had more time in my days. But as we all know, we only have 24 hours in the day, which is actually plenty. 

And I talk about this in episode two. So if you go way back to episode two, I actually have a full episode all about 24 hours in a day. And you know, feeling like you don’t have time because in reality, 24 hours is a lot, even though it doesn’t always feel that way. 

But in case you’re experiencing a busy moment in your life too, I want to dive into some ways on how to have more time or better yet some strategies to help you get time back. Okay. So that is what we’re going to be talking about in today’s episode.

Track your time

All right. So the first strategy I want to share with you is to track your time. If you feel like you’re constantly not getting things done, despite all your planning efforts, then it might be time to do some time tracking. 

There are plenty of free phone apps that make it super easy for you to track the things that you’re doing throughout the day. So this could be with your personal life stuff. 

So you might think it only takes you 15 minutes to go pick up your kids from school, when in reality, the first two weeks are taking you over an hour. Right. Or it could be the same thing with dinner. Like how many times have you seen a recipe where it’s like quick and easy and no more than 30 minutes and then you get started and you’re like, wait this at no more than 30 minutes. 

That’s how much time you are blocking out. You’re thinking, “okay, if I get started with dinner by 5:00 PM, then by 5:30, we should be eating.” But then you get started with the recipe and you still have to do this. You still have to do that. You still have to put the ingredients together. And then it’s actually taking you 45 minutes to an hour. And you’re actually eating by 6 PM. 

So that happens all the time in business as well, where you might think it’s taking you less time to do something than it actually does, so tracking the amount of time that it actually takes, you can be very, very eye opening. 

Like I said, this could be with your personal life stuff, because that obviously affects and impacts how you plan and schedule for your online business tasks. So both things, track your personal life and your only business tasks. 

Is it tedious and annoying to do? Yes. I’m not going to lie. It will be in the beginning, but if you stick to it for at least a day or two and truly track everything, then you might be surprised at how much time you’re spending doing certain things. 

Some things you might be thinking, you know, just like I gave you that recipe idea, you might be thinking it’s only taking you 30 minutes, but it’s actually taking you an hour, so no wonder you’re cutting down the time you’re actually able to work by 30 minutes without even realizing it. 

And then not to mention, you might think it’s only taking you, I don’t know, like, last week I recorded a full course. The total amount of time that, that recording time was, it was maybe an hour and a half, but it took me over two hours. Why? Because there’s parts where I stop and rerecord, I take breaks because I need to hydrate and drink some water. I need to catch my breath. So it actually takes me more than two hours to record a course that’s an hour and a half long. 

That happens for everything that we do, so you might be surprised at how long it actually takes you to do certain things. Plus you might even catch yourself doing some things longer than you probably should. So for example, how long are you scrolling on social media?

Like, maybe you think it’s only for five minutes. You’re like, “oh, I’m just taking a five minute break and scrolling on social media, and then I’ll get right back to work.” When you’re in the middle of working. But if you were to track it, then you might see that, oh, wow, like you’re actually getting sucked in and taking 20 to 30 minutes before you get back to work. 

So time tracking just really helps open your eyes with a lot of the things, because we tend to think that some stuff, some tasks don’t take as long as they actually do so it can be very, very eye opening. 

And then once you do know how you’re spending your time and how long it’s taking you to get certain tasks done, you can then prioritize your tasks based on their importance and their urgency. 

So you’ll want to focus on the high value activities that really align with your business goals. So you want to, actually have an episode, episode number four where i’m helping you prioritize your weekly tasks based on different factors so definitely go back and listen to that one if you haven’t yet. 

But this is the importance of time tracking. Once you know how long it takes you to get things done, it makes it easier for you to prioritize those tasks whenever you are working on scheduling.

Organize your online business

 All right. My second tip to help you find time is to get your online business organized. If you’ve been around here, this is no surprise because when you’re not organized, you’re wasting a lot more time than you think trying to find a file or a link or that graphic design or that folder that you saved those designs in. 

Like it takes you way longer than you think, because even though it might feel like it’s only taking you two minutes at a time, or even 30 seconds, you might think it only takes 30 seconds to find that random great idea that you stored in your notes app. 

It’s actually taking you an average of 20 minutes to refocus to complete the task at hand. So if you had to stop to find something, let’s say. You were working on editing a blog post, and you already saved the blog post images that you’re going to add to your blog post, then you’re trying to find them where you save them. Like how far down the scroll do you have to go in your downloads folder because you don’t even know where it went or where it was saved to. 

Then it’s not taking you 30 seconds or two minutes. By the time you find it and you add it, you might end up getting distracted. You might start scrolling on social media. You might do something else. You might start, your brain starts to think about other things. 

And by the time you actually get back to doing what you were actually doing, which is working on the blog post, it could take you more than 20 minutes. Like that is what studies say. 

It takes you way longer to regain your focus and so that’s why getting your online business organized is so, so important. And the best way that I really recommend that you keep all of your digital things organized in a centralized place, is by using a project men, uh, project management tool strategically. I use Trello. 

There’s other tools. There’s Asana. There’s ClickUp. There’s other tools that you can use, but use a project management tool. Okay. Episode 11 is all about strategic systems and how I use Trello to organize my business.

But you really want to use a project management tool. I transitioned from the paper clutter to digital, then I transitioned to a project management system and productivity has skyrocketed. 

And the reason why is because you can get super detailed with creating workflows based on the tasks that you tracked from the previous tip. Right, because now you’re tracking how long it’s taking you to get certain tasks done. 

You might realize that there’s other tasks missing from your checklist, from your workflows. That if you now know what those are, instead of, you know, five days later, remember like, “oh, I forgot to do this.” And then you have to go back and try to get it done.

Instead it’s already in your workflow and then you can fully complete every single task in every single project with ease because you know where and what everything is. And then you also want to make sure that you’re using proper naming conventions for your files, your folders, inside of all of your tools. 

This includes your email marketing platform, anything, in your Canva account, like so much, you want to make sure that you’re using proper naming conventions for everything. 

And what I mean by a proper naming convention means that you are changing that file name or the name of that folder, wherever you’re saving something to, to match what you would search for when you need it the next time. Okay. 

Basically, you want to get as detailed as possible when naming things, because when you want to use that search feature, and you search for something and it doesn’t pop up, that is when you’re going to wish that you had a naming convention. 

So be sure to name it. It’s only going to take two extra seconds to get something properly named. Okay. So that is the second tip to help you find time, to help you have more time in your days.

Practice detailed, flexible planning

And then lastly, the third tip is to practice detailed, flexible planning. Your plans will constantly change, which is why you want to avoid making your plans super rigid, and instead give yourself some breathing room. 

You never know when your kids or your pets are going to end up sick or when the internet is going to go out. You don’t know when life is going to throw you curveballs. So you want to make sure that you’re practicing detailed, flexible planning. 

And what I mean by this is you want to write out as many tasks as possible, like everything that you’re doing, you want to write it out. And this is why I say project management tools, because they make creating these workflows super easy. It makes it super easy for you to move tasks around as you need to.

Like I mentioned, I transitioned from a paper planner because of this, because my plans were constantly changing. I was constantly having to scribble things out and scratch things off. And then I just didn’t know how to move the task around because my priorities are my priority. 

So if I wasn’t able to get it done today, I still need to get it done tomorrow. And then that pushes everything else down. Right. And so that is what I mean by being flexible. You have to be able to just do things on the fly. You have to be able to make changes and adjustments as things come up.

I mean the online world is full of changes. Like that is the only thing that’s constant, is the fact that there’s always going to be some type of change and life is always going to throw curve balls at you. So you really want to be sure that you are being very detailed in your planning, but also keeping room for flexibility. 

Free Quiz: What type of planner are you?

Now, if you have no idea, if you are a little bit too structured, if you are maybe too flexible with your planning, then I have a free quiz that you can take at cheerstoproductivity.com/quiz.

It’s called, what type of planner are you? By the end, you’re going to know and I’m also going to send you a list of podcast episodes that I have previously recorded that are going to help you specifically based on where you’re at and what type of planner you are. 

Again, the quiz is completely free so if you want to take that, then go to cheerstoproductivity.com/quiz.

Episode Wrap-Up

And listen, while we can never truly get more than 24 hours in a day, practicing these three strategies will get you close enough. Okay. 

By knowing how long it’s actually taking you to complete certain tasks, whether it’s in your personal life or your business, by getting your business organized using strategic systems, and by practicing detailed, flexible planning, you’re going to basically be hacking time because you’re going to know how to find more time in your days. 

And you’re going to feel so much less overwhelmed with all of these things that you’re doing. It’s all working together to help you get more done in less time with less overwhelm. 

So I would love to know what you thought about this episode. Go ahead and take a screenshot and share it and tag me @cheerstoblogging on instagram and I will talk to you soon.

Thank you so much for listening to the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast with me, Lucy Reyes. To view the complete show notes and all the links mentioned in today’s episode, visit cheerstoproductivity.com/40. And before you go, make sure you subscribe wherever you’re listening so you know at once the next productive chat is released. Talk soon and cheers to your productivity and success!

References

Links Referenced in this Episode:

▶ Free quiz: What type of planner are you?

▶ Episode 2: “I don’t have enough time.”

▶ Episode 11: Using Strategic Systems to Reduce Your Overwhelm

▶ Episode 18: How to Use Trello to Organize Your Business

▶ Submit a question or topic for the podcast

Don’t miss a single episode so that you can get productive and grow your online biz without overwhelm.

Subscribe to the podcast and tune in every Wednesday: 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Podcasts | Pod.link / Pick Another App