Tick Tock - Gaining Control Of Your Time is a Piece of Cake!

At the end of the month, the clocks will spring forward, which means we all lose an hour. It always amazes me, how many people moan about losing this hour, when the reality is, that so many of us lose an hour or more a day on a regular basis; snoozing, scrolling, procrastinating… 

Many of us say that ‘we don’t have enough time in a day’ or that ‘we wish that we had more time’! 

We all have those days where we feel we are not getting anywhere or those days where we feel overwhelmingly busy, but, if this feels like a regular occurrence, it’s time to stop, reflect and gain control of your time. 

In truth, I used to find it really hard to delegate, meaning as my businesses grew, I got busier and busier.  Sometimes I’d just think; ‘oh it will just take me a few minutes, so I may as well do it’ - but this mindset was keeping me stuck and losing me; money, productivity and most importantly TIME! 

A couple of years back, we started to build up the Optimus team of staff and contractors and I now have support, which means that I have time and space for me, and I’m so conscious as to how I fill it.  I focus on using my gained time for:

• exercise
• reading and learning
• meditation
• my own coaching and development
• journaling and writing.

Meaning, I’m purposeful; I time block, plan, delegate and as a result feel I have so much more time for me.  I’ve gained my time back! 

An iPhone reminds it’s user of it’s usability, showing how many hours you’ve spent on the device and on what applications, (as a side note this sometimes shocks me and helps me revaluate my phone use-age), but, can you imagine if we had that in life?  

We all only get 24 hours a day! It’s sometimes helpful to visualise the day as a cake or pie, cut into slices. Every slice represents what you do; every hour of the day is a piece of the cake - How do you slice yours? Do you slice it wisely? Where do you need the slices to be bigger and what slice can you make smaller?

Some ideas of how you can gain some time back: 

• Be more purposeful - allow yourself time to reflect, plan, time block…
• Use a diary and/or a management tool such as; Trello, Asana or Monday.com to stay organised and on top of your workload.
• What parts of your life could you maybe get support with and delegate or outsource? This includes home life stuff as well as business – it could be you look into getting a VA, an assistant, a new member of staff, a dog walker, a cleaner, an ironing service… 

• Batch – Whether you’re batch cooking or batch content creating for your socials or podcast… what can you do in batch sessions?
• Are you an early riser or a night owl? If you can, work with your own cycle and in sync with your own productivity patterns.  
• Mute - It maybe that you decide to mute your phone or mute some WhatsApp chats, groups or apps that alert you, this puts you back in control and allows you to look at them when you decide. Or you could pop your phone in a draw or other room. 
• Time Limits - It maybe that you add a time limit to some of your apps so you’re aware of how long you’ve been scrolling and you are notified when it goes over that time allocation.
• Always schedule and allow time for rest – I always talk about taking breaks and for anyone that has studied neuroscience you will know that hustle culture goes completely against how our brains work: in fact often when we are working more we are becoming less effective cognitively as our decision making and problem solving abilities are impaired. One of the easiest ways to be more effective is rest. Rest = results.