Make time for what truly matters to you

by Henrik Edberg

There are many important things in life.

Your family and friends. A hobby perhaps. Working out and staying healthy. Reading, learning and growing as person. But finding the time for what is most important in life is not always easy. It sometimes feels like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

But even if it may not feel like it, there are often ways to improve how you use your time. In this article I’ll share some of the most effective strategies I have found for doing just that and for shaking yourself out of a rut.

Step 1: 

Write down your top 4 priorities where you see them every day

With a lack of focus on what is most important in your life it becomes easy to spend too much time and energy on aimless actions or work. On things that aren’t really that important but you do out of old habit or other unhelpful reasons.

To keep your attention in the right place it is essential to remind yourself every day of what is truly most important to you.

So ask yourself: what are the top 4 most important priorities in my life right now?

Write those four things down on two notes and put one in your workspace and the other one on your bedside table.

Step 2:

Reduce distractions at work

Ask yourself: what are the 3 most common distractions that keep me from doing my work in a focused way?

Figure out how you can prevent those things from distracting you. It could be by:

* Shutting the door to your office.

* Putting your phone on silent mode.

* Having notifications for your email shut off.

Step 3:

Reduce distractions in your personal life

Ask yourself: what are the 3 most common distractions that keep me from having quality time with the people closest to me?

The answer could for instance be your smart phone, TV-shows you just watch out of routine and not because you like them very much and bringing your work back home.

Step 4:

Set limits

One of the smarter ways to simplify your life and to free up time is to set limits.

Here are a few key areas that you can set powerful limits for:

* Your daily input - Reduce the number of blogs, newsletters, magazines, book clubs, podcasts, TV-shows etc. you follow. Just keep the ones you are really getting something out of.

* Email - Just check and process your email during one chunk of time once per day. Instead of checking it 10 times or more each day.

* Social activities - Write down a list of the social activities you are involved in after school or work. Maybe you are involved in a club or an activity that it is not as fun or rewarding as it used to be. Maybe you want to rearrange your priorities a bit to focus on something else in 2016.

Step 5:

Minimise or eliminate the things you may have missed

What else can you eliminate or minimize besides the things listed above? Some meetings at work or in school? Redditing or some online forum you hang out on a lot?

Really question and reconsider your own daily and weekly habits regularly instead of moving along in the same old tracks just because it is what you usually do.

Step 6:

Find unnoticed free time in your day

There is often quite a bit of open travel- or waiting-time during a year.

What will you use your such time for as we approach the end of this year and during 2016?

Perhaps you would like to read more while riding the train or while waiting for a meeting to start. I, for example, listen to a lot of podcasts while I’m out and about or while waiting for a meeting.

Even if you only have 20 minutes of commuting time each day you still have a many, many hours in a year that you may want to, at least partly, use in a new way.

(The writer is a 34-year -old journalism major from Sweden, who has dived into the topic of personal development, which has seen him learning from him own experiments and experience and figuring out how to build a better life. This article is one of his building a better life experiences)