Three Simple Cheats To Free Up Five Hours This Week

Keep the questions coming. I received a response to yesterday’s post asking a good question: “I want to score a quick win, but how do I manage that when I don’t have the time?” Lucky for you, Jon, I’ve got three easy ways to recover time you didn’t know you had. These three ‘cheats’ will get you on your way.

Cheat #1: Consciously decide to cut one hour of “crap” out of your schedule.
Guess what? You (and everybody else on this planet, myself included) spend time doing stuff that has little to no bearing on our quality of life long-term. So bite the bullet and declare war – or at least a guerilla attack – on that this week.

Do you watch television? Tape or Tivo five hours this week and save it for later. Do you read for fun? Ditch the novels for a week. Do you web surf aimlessly? Call it quits for just one week. Except for the part where you come to this blog, of course.

The point here is that you’re not making a “major life change” here – you’re just taking a quick pause to focus tactically on something important to gain back five hours. You can always catch up on this low-priority stuff next week (though you may find that getting more done is more satisfying enough to repeat the experiment next week).

Regardless, you’re blowing time somewhere. Free it up and take it back for a week.

Cheat #2: Take a half-day off of work.
It blows my mind how many of the people I coach never thought of this one. Most of them even have a lot of vacation built up because of heavy schedules. The concept of taking a half-day off to nail a tactical goal can be a weird shift in thinking. But it’s a great way to free up time.
But hey, you take time off to go to the doctors, or to get your car worked on … why not do it for your personal or business goals? Chances are, the world won’t end if you take a half day (and your lunch time to make five hours total). And since it’s just a half day, it won’t bust your vacation balance.

But the best part of this tactic is it automatically focuses you. Hey, you’re burning vacation time so you know up front that you better not be wasting it! That pressure keeps your nose to the grindstone.

Cheat #3: Get up earlier and love it.
Okay, you might consider this a shameless plug. But the truth is, getting up earlier isn’t hard to do if you do it with a little finesse. If you could trim forty-five minutes off of your sleep time per day you’d have those five hours in no time.

Jon, I hope you take this advice to heart – and I hope all the rest of you out there reading this put it to good use as well.

All the best,

Dave Navarro