It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when it seems like the day slips away faster than we can keep up. Fortunately, there are practical steps you can take to manage your time better and increase your efficiency. To help you reclaim more of your day, we’ve put together a list of life hacks for saving time and boosting productivity.
Meal Planning and Prepping
Cooking full meals from scratch every day can be extremely time-consuming. For this reason, if you’re looking to save time, it’s recommended to plan and prepare your meals ahead of time. Meal prepping can help you make many meals all at once, which you can then simply reheat at a later date.
Efficient Errand Running
In our busy lives, it seems like every day brings several new errands to run. However, it can be much more efficient to group errands together and then complete them all at once instead of making several trips throughout the day or week.
Delegate and Outsource
Sometimes, we have a bad habit of trying to do everything ourselves when it would make more sense to get a helping hand. Delegating and outsourcing tasks to other members of our family or colleagues can be much more efficient and less time-consuming when organized correctly.
Simplify Your Wardrobe
We’ve all been there—it’s the start of a new day, and we simply can’t decide what to wear. Over time, this indecisiveness can cost us many wasted hours of confusion. It’s usually more efficient to simplify your wardrobe and even decide on your daily outfits ahead of time, so you can move through your morning routine more quickly.
Optimize Your Workspace
As noted by Beverly Hills Therapy Group, an organized workspace makes for a focused and efficient mind. By ensuring you have everything you need at hand and are free from external clutter, you make your tasks easier and reduce the time spent searching for things you need to get the job done.
Practice Mindful Multitasking
You may have heard that multitasking is detrimental to productivity. While this is true in many cases, it can actually be beneficial to do some tasks at the same time. For example, you could listen to educational audiobooks or podcasts while walking or cooking without losing too much focus on either task.
Implement a Morning Routine
Morning routines can be highly beneficial in ensuring you start your day feeling organized, focused, and energized. You can prioritize activities that promote your mental well-being such as meditation, exercise, or organizing, helping to get you into the best mental space for a productive day.
Utilize Technology Wisely
Technology has come an incredibly long way in recent years, so why not take advantage of everything it has to offer? There are many productivity, automation, and organizational apps and websites that can help you trim hours off your week over time.
Develop Quick Decision-Making Skills
Sometimes, when making a decision, it’s hard to know which option will be best for you overall. However, by spending too long deliberating, we can end up wasting unnecessary hours over things that don’t really matter that much in the long run. Therefore, it’s best to develop quick decision-making skills and trust your instincts, especially when it comes to more trivial decisions.
Master the Art of Saying “No”
Many of us have the bad habit of taking on more tasks and responsibilities than we really have time or energy for. As pointed out by James Clear, this can cause us to spend hours on tasks we don’t want to be doing. For this reason, it’s important to learn to say “no” to others without feeling overly guilty.
Enhance Your Reading Efficiency
There are several daily tasks that involve reading and writing, so learning to enhance your reading efficiency can save you a surprising amount of time in the long run. Speed reading techniques and summaries can be very helpful in achieving this.
Optimize Leisure Time
Leisure time is incredibly important for our well-being. However, some people fall into the trap of choosing leisure activities that don’t actually leave them feeling relaxed and replenished. Evaluate your most common relaxation activities and hobbies, and make note of any that could be replaced by more relaxing or beneficial activities.
Improve Sleep Quality
We’ve all heard it before, but it’s true: sleep is incredibly important for our general health, well-being, and performance. As noted by Nature.com, good sleep quality can improve our productivity levels. On the other hand, failing to get enough quality sleep can cost us a significant amount of wasted time during the day, as our tired brains perform much less efficiently.
Batch Similar Tasks Together
When you can get into a state of flow and complete many different tasks in succession, this can save you a lot of time. See if there are any daily tasks you can batch together and complete in one sitting rather than spreading them randomly throughout the day.
Prioritize Your Tasks
There are several powerful organizational tools you can use to prioritize your tasks and ensure you’re getting your most important tasks done as soon as possible. For example, the Eisenhower Box and the use of SMART goals can help you sort your tasks by urgency and ensure every task feels achievable.
Limit Social Media Usage
Our modern-day world comes with a wide array of distractions and diversions. These distractions can end up costing you hours of wasted time throughout the day. Many studies have proven that this can have a detrimental effect on your productivity. For this reason, it’s best to limit your social media usage as much as possible when you want to get your tasks done.
Streamline Your Email Management
It’s easy to become distracted by incoming emails throughout the day, causing us to waste valuable time we could be using on other tasks. It’s a good idea to dedicate specific blocks of time to checking and replying to emails instead of constantly checking throughout the day.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
Many repetitive tasks can take unnecessary hours out of our weeks. Tasks such as paying bills, making social media posts, and doing data backups can all be automated with modern technology, saving you many hours in the long run.