too many things to do and not enough time? well, maybe u need to rethink your strategies…
Just about a few months I used to be that person who always kept on crying about how he wanted to do so many things but didn’t have enough time to do all of them.
Whenever someone would ask me — “What’s your biggest fear?”
My go-to answer used to be — “I’ll miss out on something because I don’t have enough time for everything I wanna do”
But fast forward to now I still cry about not having enough time for all the things that I want to do but more importantly, every time I’m crying about it I remind myself that
“I could have made out some time for that thing if I really wanted to do it badly enough”
Turns out we don’t really wanna do all the things that we say we want to do.
And sometimes even if we really wanna do those things we don’t do it and blame it on time because it’s easier that way.
Think about it. The idea of blaming it on time means you will not have to worry about actually dealing with the possibility of failure in whatever you’re trying to achieve.
“Oh I would have started a blog and wrote more frequently if I had enough time”
No tarat, you do have enough time. You just don’t wanna start a blog and be frequent because you’re scared of putting your work out for everyone to read, you’re scared of people judging you, you’re scared of it because you think no one will care and you’re blog could be a big miss. You’re scared of facing a failure.
Now I do understand that this might not always be true.
You might be very busy and don’t worry if you’re actually very busy then for you I have a few tips that can help you save some time from your everyday stuff so that you can stop crying and start doing that thing :)
Good enough is just fine (most of the time)
This was a game changer for me and that’s why this is my tip numero uno for you.
Most of the time you can get 90% of the work done in 70–80% of the total time.
What this means is that you spend the rest 20–30% of your time trying to perfect that 90% into a 100%.
But is it worth it though?
The answer is it depends. Sometimes you might be working on something really important for your career (let’s say) and in that case, you might not want to leave that 10% but that wouldn’t be the case for everything that you do on a day-to-day basis, and thus
When good enough gets the job done, go for it.
Don’t spend that extra half an hour trying to perfect your college essay if it ain’t going to drastically improve your score. Instead, make it good enough to achieve your target grade and move on to finish something else in those extra 30 minutes.
Credits: Rework by Jason Fried
Along the same lines, I wanna add one more thing —
Your estimates suck
How many times have you said yes to do that one more thing that you think would take you only about 30 minutes but you have no idea how you ended up wasting your entire day on it?
If you’re anything like me then this was a very common problem in my life.
I used to make predictions about how long would this extra small work would take me and more often than not I was wrong. My estimations suck.
And yours too probably.
So don’t do that. Don’t say yes to that thing just because you think it won’t take too much time from your schedule.
Here are a few examples of things you shouldn’t say yes to unless you have enough time.
- “I’ll just check my social media for a short break, maybe 10 minutes.”
Reality: You get sucked into scrolling through feeds, watching videos, and responding to messages, consuming a significant chunk of your time.
2. “I’ll assist my friend with a small task, which should be done in 25 minutes.”
Reality: The task turns out more complicated than expected, and additional issues arise, extending the helping time considerably.
3. “I’ll quickly respond to these emails in about 20 minutes.”
Reality: You end up dealing with complex email threads and unexpected follow-up tasks, taking up a couple of hours.
So yeah I hope you got the point. Don’t predict the amount of time something will take or at least you do predict it then multiply it by a factor or 2 or even 3 because you’ve most probably made a mistake.
And if you didn’t and somehow the coffee break or assisting your friend took only 10 minutes as expected, you didn’t lose anything infact you gained an extra 10 minutes because you multiplied your estimated time by 2. So now you can do more stuff in the same amount of time. It’s always a win-win situation.
Unless you didn’t plan out what to do in case you get some extra free time in your day which brings me to the next point…
Keep a f**king todo list
This is a very basic tip and it goes something like this —
“If you don’t know what to do, then you probably ain’t gonna do anything!”
(I made that up just right now)
My point is that all of us do get those 15–20 minutes of free slots randomly at some point in the day (sometimes more often than not) and we end up wasting those slots in either figuring out what to do or not trying to do anything at all because we didn’t anticipate it earlier.
You can change that. You can keep a smol list of things that you can pick up and start working on randomly at any point of time in your day if you get some free slot.
Here’s how I use my free slots when I’m in the office —
- I work on my portfolio website. The funny thing is that I’ve never sat down and taken some time to work on that website instead all of it was done in those free slots that I randomly get during my day.
- I write scripts for videos or blogs.
- I read some ongoing books or explore tech articles for my newsletter.
- I practice mindfulness or go for a run or sometimes just bug a friend for a coffee break. I mean sometimes it's fine… right?
So yuh… if you have a plan then you can act on it whenever you get the opportunity. So make a to-do list of the things that don’t require a lot of time to pick up randomly and just finish them during those free slots of your day.
Now all of these tips are fine but they will not work if you are a procrastinator… and chances are that you do procrastinate a lot, don’t you?
Make smaller and more achievable goals
This whole idea of having smaller and more achievable goals is inspired by the book Atomic habits by James Clear and the idea is very simple —
“Commit to the smallest amount of something that you can do without procrastinating”
Let’s say one of my goals is to play the piano every day… then the way I think about it is that I only have to play piano for 2 minutes every day. Just 2 minutes.
When I have such a small goal, I often don’t feel like procrastinating because 2 minutes is too little of time for me to procrastinate on.
Note: Everyone will have their own atomic time (2 minutes for me, say) and you have to find one for yourself where you just cannot say no to the task.
Now you can extend this idea to the previous tip.
So if I get 15 extra free minutes because of some canceled plan during my day, I set my goal to use 2 minutes of that 15 minutes to do one of the tasks from my todo list, and then I don’t procrastinate and actually end up using all the free time to work on my things.
Conclusion
Alright, I’m hoping some of it (if not all) was interesting for you to read and I’d be very satisfied if any of the things that I wrote about helps you get your shit done.
But either way, thank you so much for reading this article. You can find me here and that’s all…
See ya on the other side 💛
