How I Manage My Time | Time Management Tips by Jim Kwik

The T in limitless stands for time, time management. And we're thinking that, you know, most people have gone through or read a book on time management. And I just really do believe it's not just time management. It's all these other ways of managing our productivity. And time is one of those things. But I'm excited to talk about this today. Now, there's this quote that says, tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week. Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week because everyone says, I'll do it tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes, right? That's a someday. And how do you really do the things you need to do in the time that you have? And so let me start by asking you a question. I just want you to imagine for a moment. Take a moment and imagine. You can close your eyes even if you like, or just continue to watch this. Imagine there's a bank account that credits your account every morning with $86,400. It carries over no balance from day to day. Now, every evening, the bank deletes whatever part of the balance you failed to use during the day. What would you do? You'd draw out every cent, of course. You see, each of us has a bank. It's called time. Every morning it credits you with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off as a loss whatever of this you have failed to invest to a purpose. It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft. Every day it opens a new account for you. Every night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day's deposits, the loss is yours. There is no drawing against tomorrow. You must live in the present on today's deposits. Invest in it as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and contribution. So I want you to think about that. And in another way of looking at it, imagine you do have $86,400 in a bank account for that day, and somebody stole from you $10. What would you do? Would you spend the other— all the rest of the money trying to get that $10 back? Would you spend the $86,390 that you have left to try to get that $10 back? Of course not. You would let that go. But it's so interesting when it comes to people's time, because whatever you do in your time, those are votes for who you want to be and what's most important to you. But a lot of times what we'll do is You know, we'll create this storm. We'll create this storm inside that disrupts our productivity. And now some things can only be learned in a storm, but sometimes we create our own storms and we get upset when it rains, right? And sometimes we'll go after that $10 and we'll use all the resources we have, all this time and energy and emotion. And a lot of times our time, our feelings. I mean, how many of you have ever had a time in your life where the day just flew by? Right. It was a set of these emotions because when you're having fun, you lose track of time. Or maybe on the opposite side, you're doing something that you don't want to be doing and it just takes a long time and you feel bored. So a lot of the time is actually feelings. And so I want to talk about in this session is really how I manage my time. Now, this is just one pillar, one of the 9 different things that you can manage, the things that you have control over, the things you have influence over? 'Cause remember, we all have 24 hours in a day, right? And it's how we invest it, how we use that time that pays us the returns, the rewards, or maybe it even punishes us also as well. So how can you get the most of today? My first recommendation, my first quick tip for you is first assess how you're using your time. When we talked about this mind experiment where you have $86,400 in your bank account, you know, every single dollar Represents a second. So how are you investing your time right now? And so I want you to take a moment and take a piece of paper, take out your notebook that you have for your quick productivity, and I want you to just think about your day. How were you investing your time? So for example, some people use an app. They have an app on their phone and it could tell them how much time they spend on social media today or yesterday. And you maybe might want to look that up. How much time did you spend on email? How much did you spend time on working out? How much time did you spend on the phone, you know, or in meetings? They say that the average person's working less than 3 hours a day in productive work, even though they're putting in maybe 8 hours. So how are you utilizing your time? So the first part Self-awareness. You can't manage something— we're talking about time management— you can't manage something unless you what? Unless you measure it. So where is your time presently going? The second thing I would recommend is something called time blocking. Time blocking. You know, many of the most successful individuals, they don't use to-do lists. Instead, what they do is they batch the activities that they need to accomplish together in blocks of time. Now, what do I mean by that? So for example, for me, I have 2 primary activities that I focus on each day. I'm creating or I'm communicating. That's for me. For everybody else, it's different. Everybody's job and responsibility is something else. So for me, what I'll do is I'll dedicate whole days where I just create content. Whole days. Because what happens is if I go from content to connecting and back to content, I am switching contexts. And what does that do? It wastes time. And I have to activate a different part of my brain. So I've revved up this part of my brain, it's all warmed up, and then all of a sudden I stop cold and I have to reactivate a different part of my brain. And then in order to be able to communicate or to negotiate, right, or to be able to present. And so my goal here is I time batch things. I batch things around the things, the activities that I do. And you might not have flexibility in your job or your career to do that. So then you could break it down by parts of a day. So for example, let's say that maybe the first few hours of the day you are focusing on what? Making things. The first few hours of the day you're just making. You are creating. The next few hours, what are you doing? Maybe you're managing. You're in management mode and you're managing your work or you're managing communications also as well. And then maybe the last 3 hours of the day, of your workday, if you will, you're in marketing mode. And that's where you're doing all your outbound, your social media, your emails that you're writing, and you're in marketing mode. The goal here is never to get perfect because you won't get it perfect. But if you start batching the activities that you need around certain periods of time, instead of just having a to-do list, you don't have to switch from activity to activity. And it burns a lot of energy and it wastes a lot of time. So when I'm talking about blocking time, leaders, what they'll do is they'll batch and block times around the activities that they have. So maybe they'll do all their calls at a certain— in an afternoon, or maybe Tuesday afternoons is when they do phone calls. And this is the other thing, you could batch by activity. We talked about that. You could batch by time. You could also batch by environment. Mm-hmm. Sometimes if you work in a certain environment, some people have different work environments and they'll do one activity in one environment and They'll do their calls while they go for a walk, or they'll do their calls when they're on their elliptical. So you could batch by time, you could batch by activity, you could batch by location. You could also batch by your energy, meaning there's certain times of the day— we talked about this— when you have more energy than others. And this is your creative energy. So if you have a creative energy, very vibrant, you're a morning individual, And you are an early bird, maybe that's your time that you decide to allocate writing, right? Because you're batching around energy. You could also batch around people. Maybe you're working with a team at work, or you're working with your kids, or you're working with other individuals, and you can batch around activities around that, being around those certain people, right? So you could do it around time, you could do it around a location, you could do it around people, you could batch around Energy and activity also as well. And building on people, there are some studies that suggest that certain activities are well done by collaboration. And so learning and productivity, it can be social, but also learning and productivity could also be solo. And so it's different for each individual. Some people like collaboration or they like working remotely and they like working on Zoom because it gives them energy. Other people are more introverted and they like to rejuvenate and be creative by themselves. And there's no right or wrong here. The whole point of this program is to give you enough ideas to figure out what inspires me, what instructions, what insights, what can I do here and get feedback. So some people love being around people. They love to batch around people. They love to collaborate with individuals. Test it. For you, you might be more of a solo individual. You like to be more creative and get more done really focused on yourself. So people makes a difference. Another way of optimizing your time besides time blocking and batching is to use that transmission time, meaning when you are in transit and you're going from one context to another, use that time to learn, use that time to work. Often when we are— you're on your train or you're on an airplane or you're commuting to work, That's a wonderful time to be able to fill in, to be able to get your 5-hour rule. The 5-hour rule from Benjamin Franklin says you want to be able to learn an hour a day, and maybe that hour comes from your commute to work. Maybe you want to turn your car or your automobile into a university on wheels, and that's how you're going to be more time efficient. You're going to listen to your podcast, or you're going to maybe listen to your podcast at 1.5 or 2x faster. And that allows you to use your commute time to be able to get more done in less time. The truth is we have enough time, 86,400 seconds. But the challenge is we're not paying attention to that time and where it's going presently. So what are the choices you can make upstream to really direct your time? You know, I believe that we are the pilot of our lives. We're not the passenger. So how can you take your responsibility? Your ability to your sovereignty, if you will, to be able to influence with the simple choices you make every single day. So for example, I subscribe to the 2-minute rule by David Allen, saying that if something comes across my desk and I could get that task done in 2 minutes or less, then I just do it. I don't defer it. I don't schedule it for the future. I just get it done because it takes less energy and effort and time to do it now than to be able to push it off and hold space for it sometime in the future. So my question for you is, how are you managing your time? Let's make this a big discussion because there's so many people watching this from all around the world. You all have different life experiences. Put it down in the comments below. How are you mastering your time? How are you getting the most out of your time? What are the best tips you have for your productivity to really maximize the time, the minutes, the hours, the days you have in your life? Because that is what your life is made of— time. Put the information down below. Put your non-negotiables, the best tips that you have, maybe 1, 2, or 3 in the comments. Let's learn from each other. Let's vote them up also as well. Let's cheer them on. And remember, review, quiz, and teach. Go over the lessons of this lesson. Make sure you also write down notes and you review your notes because that spaced review is so important for that repetition to really anchor in your long-term memory. And then And finally, who could you teach this to somebody else? Tell them that story about the $86,400 that's in your bank account. Share with them this concept of batching, you know, and time blocking. And most of all, use it for yourself. Experiment with this today and tomorrow and put your feedback down below. I'm your brain coach, Jim Kwik. I'll see you in our next lesson. Until then, be limitless.