Making the most of your time
Day 334 / 365
The reason why I started this daily blog as well as my one book a week challenge this year was because, at the time, I had a lot of free time and nothing to fill it with. I had a comfortable 9 — 5 job that didn’t require me to work at all at home. But soon I switched to a more demanding job, and it became a bit difficult to take time out for these personal projects.
To make things even worse, I took up some other software projects on the side as well. By September, I was working 100+ hours a week. But I still somehow managed to take time out for this blog and the books.
The most surprising part is, that I still feel sometimes that I have a decent amount of free time during the day. What I have learned from all this is that the productivity level that we function at normally is nowhere near what we are capable of. To make the most of the 24 hours that we get each day, all we got to do is adapt to the requirements and manage our times well.
Throughout the year I had been reading blogs, listening to podcasts and reading books about this topic. And I have found a few tips that have actually worked for me.
My biggest revelation is that we usually overestimate the amount of time it will take for us to do a task. If you ever sit at your desk with a timer and measure the amount of time you are actually working, and not checking your phone or talking to a friend, or generally distracted, you would find out that you actually worked about 50% of the time.
How do you solve this then? I use the Pomodoro Technique, which is working in 25 min sessions, without distractions.
The next important thing is actually planning all of your work. You would waste a lot of time deciding what to work on. Sometimes you would find that you have some free time that you could have utilized to do some work if only you had planned for it.
I always work off a To-do list. Any work that comes to me, whether big or small, goes to the list first.