Reordering Priorities Can Free up Your Time—at Least a Little, Author Says

When we figure out what we can take away, we can free up space to focus on what we need.pixelheadphoto digitalskillet/Shutterstock

Time is a precious commodity—especially when we lead busy lives. We all get 24 hours in one day, many of us wishing we could have just a few more to get it all done. With a little strategizing, is it actually possible to get some of our time back?

That’s the notion behind “The 1 Day Refund: Take Back Time, Spend It Wisely” by Donna McGeorge. The Australia-based time guru believes that people can recover 15 percent of their time—one day per week—and lead more purposeful, productive lives.

It sounds like a tall order, but McGeorge says it’s possible to do more in life by doing less. Her book isn’t just about reclaiming your time to do more at work; in fact, freeing up 15 percent of your time can be used to have a less-jammed schedule or do the elusive “nothing at all.”

“If you are so busy, your calendar is so full that people can’t get time with you, chances are you are missing things,” McGeorge told The Epoch Times.

So I asked her, why 15 percent?

“The key is to operate at 85 percent capacity so you’re not fully stretched and stressed the whole time,” McGeorge said. “You don’t need to be 100 percent on 100 percent of the time. That’s the path to burnout and illness.”

Less is more, so the principles in the book are really about better optimizing the time you have so you can free up extra time. The book is broken down into sections for how to make thinking, breathing, living, working space.

“The constant question is what can we take away, do less of or streamline and simplify. We need to do this with our work and lives. Remove friction and experience more flow. Or simply slow down the pace,” she said.

As she writes in her book: “We become so crippled by thinking about all the things we need to do that we resort to doing all the wrong things, so we end up feeling unfulfilled at the end of the day. Sadly, we often repeat the cycle day after day.”

Why You Should Make Time

It’s not hard to set aside time in our calendars for appointments and meetings, McGeorge notes. But it can be hard to make time to loosen up your schedule.

“So many of us sacrifice our time to other people’s needs, agendas, or problems,” she said. “It’s important to remind yourself that in order to be your best self in whatever situation you’re in, you need space.”

If you’re not sure that you want to reclaim your time (or what to do with that time if you can), McGeorge advises you to “just stop.” 

“Find yourself an hour (at least) and just sit. Then you need to decompress or take stock,” she suggested. “Write down everything that’s on your mind. Everything.” This includes tasks to be done and things that you’re thinking about. Then make decisions based on the filters of things that need to be done now, not now, or never; and what you need to do versus what you can delegate.

“Whether you’re a CEO or a stay-at-home mom, people rely on you to have your act together, to make decisions, to have a plan. If you’re not taking the time to create space for this, you’re at risk of letting the most important people in your world down,” she said.

Giving your mind space to decompress and write things down can help you ask yourself which things you should do that have the biggest impact, and which activities can be eliminated, automated, or delegated. Right there, you’re freeing up space.

Frequently ask yourself, “What am I doing today that my future self will thank me for?” she advises.

A big part of that means doing what matters.

“Do three important things and not a hundred low-value things,” she said. “The Pareto principle can apply here by identifying the 20 percent of activities you do that yield 80 percent of your results.”

How to Make Time

Want to free up your time? Here are a few tips that McGeorge suggests:

Start small. If setting aside one hour per day feels like too much, then try for 30 minutes. Set aside any amount of time. “Whatever you feel you can protect and not give away,” she advises.

Look at the beginning or end of the day. If you finish the workday at 5:30 p.m., for example, look at protecting the last 30 to 60 minutes of your day. “That way you have a bit more control over your state at the end of the day, and you can use that time to wrap things up,” she said. Early bird? Don’t load the beginning of your day with meetings or activities. “Many people start a little earlier to accomplish this, but I’m not sure we have to,” she said. “Simply decide that the first hour is for you.”

Time-block meetings. Having random meetings scattered throughout your day can eat up your whole schedule, leaving you little time for heads-down work. Blocking time for meetings helps secure (hopefully) uninterrupted time for other tasks.

Monitor messages—just not all day. It’s tempting to check your inbox constantly, but the practice can interrupt your flow. Check in at frequent intervals, maybe for the first five minutes of each hour instead of every 15 minutes.

Dig in. Another way to get things done is to go hard for an hour—something that McGeorge calls an “hour of power.” Set a stopwatch and get to work, whether you need to do laundry or prepare a presentation for an upcoming meeting. “If you spend one hour per day fully focused on one task, you will surprise yourself with what’s possible,” she said. Sometimes getting something done frees up other resources.

What to Do With More Time

Reclaiming your time does little if you don’t use it well. All that eliminating, prioritizing, eliminating, and delegating now needs to be put to good use. You’ve got to figure out what new activity aligns with your purpose, McGeorge said.

For some people, that purpose is to de-stress and gain some breathing room in their day. If that is you, you’ll now have to quiet your mind and unwind. That can involve taking a walk, meditating, or daydreaming, which all have therapeutic benefits.

Others may be trying to make a breakthrough at work and want the time for more work. If that’s you, you’ll want to have a clear view of what you’re trying to accomplish at work.

Not sure what you want to do with your time and feel like you need to find some purpose first? Get out in nature and ponder that question, McGeorge said.

“It’s not about life, the universe, and everything, it’s about putting aspects of your world into perspective,” she said.

Taking Back Your Time—and Your Power Over It

Reclaiming your time and spending it wisely is one part of the equation. Discovering the buzzkills in your day is another that can help you personalize how you organize your day.

Whether you’re a mom or a business owner, you have to make decisions all day. While we may not think of decisions as requiring much energy, they do. Each decision requires us to weigh options and sacrifice one path over another. It’s a lot of mental and emotional effort, and it can leave you with decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue is an energy vampire. For example, if you walk through the door after a long day of work and a family member asks what’s for dinner, it can feel especially burdensome if you’ve already been making decisions all day long. Once you have decision fatigue, each decision can feel harder to make, which can lead to avoiding decisions and actually lengthening the process, thereby deepening the resulting fatigue.

Sometimes we avoid the big decisions because they seem to involve more risk. As a result, we can spend a lot of time on smaller decisions. That’s not a great approach.

“What are the larger decisions you can make that eliminate a bunch of small ones?” McGeorge asks.

For example, you can decide at the beginning of the week what dinner will be each day and that you will order dinner on any one night where you’re just too tired to deal with it.

Reminder Time

It’s entirely possible you can optimize your time to get back your 15 percent. If you do, you can likely reduce that overwhelmed feeling of chaos that can claim us when we don’t feel like we have the time we need for the things before us. Once you’ve done that, it’s a matter of what you want to do with that time. And it’s perfectly acceptable to say you don’t want to do anything at all. Free, unstructured time to walk or contemplate the miracle of creation or just chit-chat more with a neighbor is meaningful even if it doesn’t fit into the idea of being “productive.”

Knowing what you want to do with that extra 15 percent can give you the motivation to take the steps necessary to get it. And McGeorge’s book can help.

The good news is that even if you don’t feel you have the time or energy to read a whole book about saving time, you don’t have to. McGeorge’s book is broken down so you can digest it in small bits. Plus, there are illustrations that make her principles easy to grasp if you’re a visual learner.

“My principles work for anyone who is wanting to overcome overwhelm, take back control, and focus on what’s important,” McGeorge said.