Recently, I injured myself. I had to stop doing sports for a few weeks. Coincidentally, I stopped taking the language lessons that I had been taking for the last two years

Stopping those two activities freed a lot of time on my schedule and I started to play Zelda - Breath of the Wild. I loved it! It brought me so much joy. It was only a few weeks after that I realized: I had not played video games much in the last few years. How strange! It is one of my passions, I love playing video games. So why don’t I play more often?

I do not have time to do it.

It is not only me and not only about video games. We all have more things that we wish we could do than time to actually do them.

We want to exercise our passions, take care of our loved ones, grow new skills! All of that while needing to do adult things: earn money, eat healthily, do chores, get a loan, buy a property… All of this takes time, and it never gets better. It gets worse as time goes on because adult things tend to take more and more time in our schedule.

Is there a limit to what we can do?

I do not think so.

I wrote that I did not have time to play videogames but I should have written that I did not take time to play videogames.

I believe that we always have the time to do things but we choose not to -sometimes unconsciously, still.

I clearly remember my old boss, who was able to juggle between running his company, preparing for the birth of his first child, and doing tons of interesting things on the side. I remember, at school, even during super extra busy weeks where we had to trade sleeping hours for studying time, some guys managed to go to the gym twice… And they still passed!

Actually, I remember that some of the most successful people I met would put in way fewer hours than me and do better. So what do they do that I do not?!

The two plagues that eat up all of our time

I tried to come up with what takes up time during a week for me. The first thing that came to my mind is sleep. I do not plan to make compromises on sleeping, so the next contenders were work and distractions.

Work

I work a standard office job. Thankfully, I do not have much commute, so we can consider that it eats around 8 hours a day, five days a week. Still, that is a huge portion of the week. Plus, after a day of work, I usually feel drained and it is hard to motivate myself to do something productive.

I believe that this is pretty relatable to most people working full-time. So, what do we do, do we stop working?

Well, this could definitely be a solution, but I have not planned to become rich in the next five years. I think that there are a few things that can help.

First, I believe that we should thrive to make our professional and personal goals converge. It is unlikely that we can stop working at all, so we should try to make the most of those 8 hours per day. For example, I have been trying to get into open source for a long time. Some of my responsibilities in my current job are to actually do some open source work! So this time is not “lost”. The collateral advantage is that it forces you to commit to things: again, I had been trying for a long time to work on open source in my own, free time. However, I would struggle to find the time and motivation to keep at it after a full day of work. Now, I have no choice but to do it and it does not consume time outside of work.

Then, to land a job at a company with a flexible work environment helps to arrange our off-work time. With remote days comes less commute time. Flexible working hours leave the room to arrange one’s day to optimize for time. Good news: this is getting more and more common, probably thanks to COVID

Lastly, maybe we could just work less. It requires a good enough salary to still be able to pay rent, but to work 4 days a week or only 3 weeks a month can free a huge amount of time for things that are important to you.

Social media and distractions

This one is more personal but you may recognize some patterns of yours.

It is fair to say that I have some kind of addiction to my phone. I checked the usage reports built by my smartphone and constated that I spend between 2 and 5 hours on my phone during weekdays and roughly the double during days off. Thanks god I never installed TikTok.

I realized that there are many times when I will pick up my phone out of habit and loose track of time. When I get bored. When I go to the toilet. When I wake up. When I finish eating. I guess that I take my phone with me whatever I do and pick it up without giving it a thought.

There are other, more harmful times when I will pick up my phone unconsciously. I realized that, whenever I am doing something, if I hit the smallest inconvenience, I have this reflex to pull up my phone and open an app. For example, while writing this article, I caught myself multiple times picking up my phone whenever I had difficulties to formulate a sentence correctly. The same happens with things that I am obligated to do -but that I obviously do not want to, like chores. I guess that it is yet another way to procrastinate.

Distractions: is self-discipline the answer?

From what I just wrote, it seems that the most actionable problem is to reduce distractions throughout the day. They look like insidious ways in which we waste time. Here are a few things that have been helping me so far:

  • At work, check Slack and emails at fixed hours, e.g. 10 am, 12 pm, 2 pm, 4 pm, 6 pm. There is no need to answer people in minutes. Also, it turns out that instant messaging at work is also a distraction: I realized that I would sometimes fish for work. I have this bad habit to react to people’s messages, questions and requests on Slack: as a result, I tend to spend time looking into unexpected topics for minutes, sometimes hours. While it is not necessarily bad, I often invest this time unconsciously. It is not always worth it: there are maybe more important topics, for the company or for me, that I should tackle instead.
  • Techniques like Pomodoro, where you typically work in thirty minutes sessions and have mandatory five minutes breaks in between each session can be effective. It is stupidly effective on me: I feel obligated to follow that damn timer. Also, during the regular pauses, you should force yourself not to use your phone - you should only do things that will not make you context switch, like taking a look at the street, stretching, drinking water, or going to the toilet. There are better techniques out there: I can recommend Justin Sung’s channel, which goes deeper into studying techniques and how they work.
  • To put my phone face down or in another room while I’m working has been pretty efficient for me. Sometimes, I even surprise myself trying to reach out for it while it is in another room.
  • At work, I sometimes force myself to stop at a clearly defined time (e.g. 6:30 pm). It is so easy to hop onto little things late in the day and time can fly. I also realize that I can easily spend one or two hours at the end of the day and produce underwhelming results, which is not worth it. Finally, it helps because it gives a feeling of control: instead of quitting work when another obligation comes up, like preparing dinner, we can be proactive. The same goes for clearing time in the morning before starting to work.

These look nice, but to be honest, I really struggle to do these kinds of things consistently. I do those once in a while, and every time, I am like: “Huh, today was great, how come?!”. I wonder how to force oneself to do those things regularly -maybe self-discipline is the best solution to time management issues.

On the other hand, I do not want to be so strict on myself. I would hate to turn into one of those productivity nerds, proudly waking up at 4 am to start their meticulously crafted miracle morning routine. I believe that it is important to keep room for surprises, unknowns, and daydreaming in life. For example, I like to spend time on Twitter. I also get value from this time as I often stumble upon interesting tweets or technical discussions. I believe that I simply spend more time there than I should.

Here are a few things that I would like to try:

  • Limit the time spent on social media. A good fit would maybe be to allow some apps to be opened only during some time ranges during the day, for example, 8 pm to 10 pm.
  • Build habits. I feel like spending five or ten minutes a day on something could yield powerful results over time. Take language learning: ten minutes a day spent on vocabulary would be a big win over a year. I personally never manage to keep my habits running for more than one or two weeks.

Put time to good use

Now, saving time is clearly a win, but more than that, it is necessary to put free time to good use.

It can feel like tasks catch up to you: you react to them instead of initiating them. It can be overwhelming to not be in control. What is more, this is frustrating because you may feel like you do not get to spend time on things that matter.

Let us take a real-life example: say I have a language lesson coming up today. I generally have homework to do before. If I let this obligation come to me, I will probably rush through my exercises just before the lesson begins and feel terrible. On the other hand, if I consciously dedicate time days before to do them, I feel good: I am in control, I want to do my homework and I am happy to take out my notebook to study.

This is similar to what happens when we fish for work on Slack: we unconsciously accept work instead of conscientiously choosing the work we do.

If this happens regularly, the consequences add up over time. In my case, this happens every day. If you asked me on January 1st what I wanted to focus my free time on this new year, big chances are that it is not what I spent my free time on so far. I think that this tendency to be reactive to what is happening around me is the main cause.

I think that -gosh I hate to say it- we need to be conscious about where we invest our time -there I said it 🤦. Once again, here is a mix of things that can be done to fight this bad habit:

  • Be decisive. When confronted with a difficult choice, people can have (I have it) this very bad tendency to try not to compromise and find out a win-win solution. Truth is, a perfect solution may unfold. However, in practice, what happens most often is that we put off taking a decision so long that we end up with less and less room to maneuver until a choice is forced onto us. An article that helped me navigate through that is the blog post There’s No Secret Option C by Emily Oster. Unfortunately, this article is now behind a paywall. Here, she mentions that, given a problem with two options, A and B, we need to actively choose one of them, even though they both have distinct downsides. We tend to wait, unable to make a choice, secretly hoping for an option C to magically appear. She argues that it is better to force oneself to make an active choice instead of letting fate decide for us.
  • Give oneself objectives: for example, “run 5 kilometers per week” instead of “exercise more”. Having a concrete goal instead of an abstract one makes it easier to keep the motivation running. A complementary tip is to break down big objectives into smaller, more reachable ones.
  • Organize your days. Once again, self-discipline is pretty efficient. Sometimes, I begin my weekends with activities or tasks in mind. Then, I tend to achieve more than when I have nothing planned, probably because I am more focused and there is less room for slacking and wondering.

I mostly wrote this post because I struggle to organize my time correctly. Writing my thoughts has been helpful to see more clearly. If this can help someone out there too, that is a bonus!