How to get more time

In my senior year of high school, I remember seeing this video:

It got my head thinking about my future and my career.

How am I using my time?

Do we constantly feel stuck in an endless loop of waking up, commuting, working, commuting, eating, and sleeping? Are we tired of working endlessly, or maybe we are simply not making headway in our dreams?

To those who are unhappy with themselves, the ones who are working paycheck to paycheck at a job they hate, no longer having time to spend or work on passions in their life. Please read on.

What is Work?

For a start, we should understand productivity. We think it's a simple equation.

Time = productivity.

Whenever we put in the hours, whether in school or a desk job, we are being productive. And the more hours we put in, we should have proportional results. So, if we aren't getting the desired results, we must put in more time.

Except that's not what the equation is. At least that's not what Tim Ferris thinks anyways. In his book The Four-Hour Work Week, he argues that putting in hours and doing work busy work is not sufficient. Doing more work does not mean we are doing better work. We could be cleaning a room with a toothbrush feeling like we are productive when we missed seeing there was a broom.

So the equation is actually this

Time x Effort = Productivity

If we want to accomplish more in less time, we must put in more quality effort.

Now that we understand the concepts, here are some tips derived from the Four-Hour Work Week.

1. Know your goals

If you want to achieve anything, you need to know where you are going. Why do you have to accomplish these goals? Is it for financial freedom, or maybe it is fulfillment? Write a SMART goal on what you want to achieve in life. Make sure you also break down each smart goal into tasks on which you can start taking action. Do several for different areas of your life and other times. For example, what will you do to achieve your dreams in the next six months? The next year? And the next 5-10 years.

2. Prioritize

After establishing our goals, we need to know how to prioritize what tasks are relevant or worthwhile—one for general stuff and one for specific work. The quadrant method allows me to prioritize what is essential and urgent. After categorizing tasks, I can then get to work more efficiently. For more specific tasks like studying or working on a project method, I use the 80/20 rule that I have here 20 % of work will net you 80% of your results. The 80/20 is perfect for assessing where I should prioritize my courseload or where I can maximize efficiency in projects.

3. Optimize

It's probably really important to remember that a lot of things that you're doing and not be as important as we seems because we have fixated a lot of it onto ourselves too make really valuable I would be. That a lot of the things that we actually are doing are not as important but this requires you to be very scrutinizing. On a list write down the statements that are given to Joy things that are adding large productivity. Also in this list categorize what is actually causing you the most pain and what is causing you to eat up a lot of the hours. Of those of those things that cause a lot of pain as much as possible if you want to remove because that is the simplest way to just get more time is to not have those things exist in your life to begin with

The other tips are automate or to delegate those work but that could create a lot of busy work which is something that we don't want in Tim ferris's book he writes it's better to eliminate than automate and automate before delegating or you're almost right you know you should never optimize something that should never exist

If you keep this in mind and you're kind of stick to the idea of how you can remove things from your life you can start clearing out things that don't matter and do things that actually do matter.

As you start working towards your goals learning how to tweak your productivity systems will help shave off unnecessary time.

Habits are a very cheap and effective method to start automating yourself. It streamlines decisiveness and avoids distractions from watching the 3rd episode in a row on Netflix when you should be finishing your homework. It also is one of the most important places to start; if you want to get out of the rat race, becoming aware of destructive behaviors that hinder you from achieving your goals is essential for growth. You can start with something simple like drinking water first thing when you wake up or meditating for a minute.

I talk about habit-building here if you are curious.

A good work environment is vital to getting good work done. If everything is scattered everywhere, we constantly stress where everything is and waste time finding our lost belongings. Think about how to declutter items from your workspace and put tools you regularly use in spots where it's easy for you to grab.

The last thing on the list is automation

Automation is super helpful for menial tasks like scheduling and cooking.

It cuts down on unnecessary you need to take for tasks. And in doing so, you can spend that time on other things like your passions. Now it's much easier to do because with automation tools like make.com and AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting in certain areas so what may have been a lot of monotonous work you can now automate with these tools and they're super useful because no one would ever want to do these things and it's not creative it doesn't feel like it's productive it's not enjoyable but these tasks still need to be done in some shape or form so as much as possible after you feel limited then some of these tasks automate.

To manage certain tasks and ideas because so that you can stay organized and constantly keep track and you can collaborate with other people this is why something like notion or obsidian it's really useful because it's very seamless it's very intuitive.

I would also suggest every once a month or every couple of weeks to re-review the system for maintenance