Finding Time: How to use the 24 hours you are given each day

How often do you wish there were more hours in a day?

Perhaps you want to follow a healthier lifestyle, enjoy a hobby, go back to school, or start a side business? Finding time for the activities associated with your goals can be difficult – especially if you work full-time and have children.

I share your frustration. As a wife, mom, design educator, photographer and blogger I am constantly balancing my schedule to try to fit everything in. I’m not always successful. (I am human, after all.) But I have learned a few things about finding time.

The best suggestion I can offer is to be proactive with time management instead of reactive.

Being proactive is simply a matter of planning how to best use the time you have…

To begin, you need to recognize how much time you spend on different activities. Your time can be divided into four different types of hours:

1. Survival Hours

Survival hours include:

• Sleeping (8 hrs)
• Eating (1 hr)
• Exercising (30 min)
• Meditating or praying (15 min)
• Showering, etc. (30 min)

Survival hours are the most important hours in the day because, well, your health and wellbeing depend on these activities. You don’t want to skimp on these hours – so straight off the top you are down to about 14 remaining hours to work with.

2. Work Hours

Work hours include time spent getting to and from and attending a paying job. These hours vary from one person to the next. Let’s go with some averages:

• Full-time job (8 hrs)
• Commute (1 hr)

Like I said, work hours and commute times vary. My husband and I both work full-time, but while he commutes 3 hours a day, I just walk downstairs to my office. Working from home buys me extra time. Plug in the numbers that describe your situation. If we use the average numbers I’ve shown above, we have 5 hours remaining in our 24-hour day.

3. Home Management Hours

Home management hours may include:

• Cooking
• Cleaning
• Grocery Shopping
• Paying Bills
• Running Errands, etc.

While these hours also vary from day to day and person to person, let’s go with a conservative estimate that at least 1 or 2 hours are spent on some form of home management each day. With this scenario, we are left with an average of 3 or 4 personal hours.

4. Personal Hours

Personal hours include the free time we spend with:

• Family
• Friends
• Hobbies and pastimes

Personal hours are usually spent on activities we enjoy. They are also the hours we are most likely to squander. (I too am guilty of binging on Netflix…)

Finding Time: Taking A Mindful Approach

Assuming you want to squeeze something more into your day to meet a particular goal, where is the time going to come from?

Most folks tend to carve extra time out of their survival hours. They get less sleep, skip exercising and make less than healthy food choices – all in the interest of finding time.

This is a mistake. Remember, your health and well being depend on these survival hours. You are less likely to reach your goal if you are not taking good care of yourself.

Carving time out of survival hours is a reactive approach to time management.

A better approach would be to use your remaining hours more mindfully. Take a hard look at your day and ask yourself the following questions:

1. In addition to survival hours, which activities are must-dos?
2. Is there a way to be more efficient with these must-do activities?
3. Which activities can I give-up, postpone or delegate?
4. Where or how am I wasting time?
5. How much “down-time” do I need to recharge and remain enthusiastic?
6. Based on my answers to the previous five questions, how much personal time do I have today?

Once you determine how much personal time you have to work with, then it’s a simple matter of deciding how you will use that time. While your overall goals can remain steadfast, you may need to adjust your timeline and expectations to realistically reflect how much you can actually accomplish on any given day.

Planning how to use personal hours is a proactive approach to time management.

Case Study: How Bloggers Manage Their Time

Successful bloggers have to be good at finding time for all the activities associated with running a blog – especially if they also work full-time elsewhere. While I was developing this article I asked some of my fellow food bloggers to share how they approach the balancing act.

Jennifer at PeppersandPeaches.com offered the following advice:

My biggest tip is to get a blog schedule and stick to it the best you can. I do all my photo shoots on the weekends and type up my recipes on Sunday nights. Then I just have to set up times to edit photos, write posts, and put everything together. I leave a little flexibility, as you never know what is going to come up in your life! Also, as for social media I find it is best for me to spend a little time interacting before work, on my lunch break, and then a little bit after work. Just enough to stay active!

Jennifer works full-time and has been blogging for nearly a year. She makes good use of her personal hours by performing more labor-intensive activities on weekends when she has more free time. She has also established a realistic plan for participating on social media based on what her schedule allows.

Moran at VeganHightechMom.com shared:

What I’ve learned is there are no shortcuts. My blog takes way (way!) more time than I ever imagined it would, but it is my passion so I feel like it is time well spent.  I try to include my girls in the shooting sessions as much as possible, so that at least this task will be family time. Lucky for me my father-in-law takes the photographs for my blog so we all earn some extended family time together…

Moran is a full-time tech employee, a mom of two little girls, and has been blogging for five months. She efficiently achieves double duty with her personal hours by turning blogging activities into family time.

These are two examples. Every blogger has a slightly different approach to finding time in their schedule. But note how Jennifer and Moran both developed a consistent plan they can stick with over time.

The same is true for managing any kind of activity. You have to determine what works for you. Conduct an honest assessment of the time you have and what you can realistically achieve on any given day. Then stick with it!