As we approach spring break and get ready for the insanity of March, there is nothing more important than having time to spend with those we love. As such, today I will share a way to actually create time in our lives so that we can have more of it for our breaks.

The method for creating time is three-fold when it comes to my work and the first one is something that anyone can do in their lives. The second two are great to keep in mind for my future as well and I wanted to share all of them with you. So how am I going to create time?

The first and most important step for me is simple. Sacrifice time now so that you have more free time in the future. For me, this means that you want to find those things in your life and your business today that you can invest a block of time in today so that you do not have to worry about them in the future. On the most simplistic form, this can be a 1:1 exchange so that you can enjoy time in the future without worry. For me, this means front-loading my work. Finding all the things I need to get done between today and say, April 1st. I utilize the success compression techniques to get that all done in the next week so that I can live through vacations without those things preying on my mind. That doesn’t create time though, so how is that useful?

The key to this step is to find those things in my life where I can spend a block of time now so that I can repeatedly save that time later.  Let’s take checking emails.  I can either check every email as the come in throughout the day as my phone notifies me of them or I can set times when I go through all of them.  This means that instead of taking the time to log in, read the email, sort it and/or respond to it for every email, I only do it twice a day.  This means saving the time for each login and log out because I only do that twice a day instead of 30+ times a day.  The emails still get responded to but I gain several minutes every day in doing this so that I can spend that time of important things like friends and family. 

The second way to create time is something that works for anyone with a business up and in operation and it starts with realizing what our time is worth. To do this we need to focus on our goals.

How much do we want to be making from our business on a yearly basis? For anyone that wants success, $250,000.00 a year seems like a good start. I then take that number and divide it by the number of hours I work a year, 9000 for a normal 40 hours a week. This will leave me needing to make $125 an hour to meet my goal! This brings s me to step 2 in creating time, which is to delegate.  Now that I have an idea of what my time should be worth, I can find those activities that I do on regularly that does not make us this income. Then, simply hire a professional to get all that done for a fraction of our hourly wage, say $20 an hour, so that we can focus on the things that do earn us that $125 an hour that we need. Heck even if you don’t have a business, maybe the kid down the street will mow your yard or take out your trash for a few bucks.  If it isn’t bringing you directly closer to your goals, delegate it.  

There is extra benefit to this for me. I am not an expert at filing or anything along those lines, so it takes me a large amount of time to get those types of things done. Don’t believe me ask the wife.  She is a filing wiz and can have an entire stack of documents filed in the time it takes me to remember how the filing system works! Someone who is experienced and a pro at it can get it done in a fraction of the time, as demonstrated by my wife. If I have four hours of filing to do and I do it myself,  filing is costing me $500 dollars to do. Instead, I hire a professional at $20 an hour to get it done and due to their expertise; they get it done in an hour. I have just saved myself $480 and 4 hours of time.Talk about a quick and easy way to create time for myself.

Finally, to create time we have to create structures. Repeating activities over and over again without well laid out structures uses far more time than if we invest some time to create a structure for those items. Once we create a structure, or workflow if you would prefer, we can get those repeated activities done far faster since we are not starting from scratch each time. That time we just created with the structure is time that we can be using elsewhere to live our life. Now we have to go back into the second step of delegation. That structure we have created for those repeated activities allows us to have a framework that we can hire someone else to complete for us, creating even more time!

For me, these strategies allow me to get far more done in less time  than I would otherwise be able to and that translates directly into my goals of spending more time on the pursuits and people that I love. Combine this with the Success Compression and I have a recipe to not only create more time for my passions, but to do so in a far more productive manner than I would otherwise.

So where can you manufacture time in your life so that you can live your passions instead of just dream about them?

~Dominic

Life’s too Short to Have Bad Days!  What are you doing to make today fantastic?