How To Make Time Work For You

You overestimate what you can do in a day and underestimate what you can do in a year. That's the main reason why you never have enough time. But there is a way to take control of your time and make it work for you. Let us explain.

Welcome to a lux. When people say they don't have the time, what they're really telling you is they don't have any priorities. They've got to a point where everything seems urgent, time is pressing, and they feel overwhelmed. This happens when you highly overestimate what you can do in a single day. You imagine a version of yourself that's more productive and more efficient than ever. You think you'll wake up really early and work until late at night, and you'll get everything done.

But here's the thing: okay, people don't rise to their own expectations. Instead, they fall to the level of their preparation. In other words, no matter how hard you pump yourself up and imagine the most productive day of your life, that will almost never happen. You cannot expect to be this highly efficient beast just because you woke up at 5 AM and put a motivational playlist on Spotify. Instead, what happens is you have a burst of momentum in the first part of your day, and it slowly goes away by noon. You're still left with a ton of work to do and not enough time or energy to do it.

So you end up looking for ways to postpone whatever you can and look for excuses on why you can't get certain things done. If you really think about it, we're sure you'll find plenty of examples in your life where this is happening. You told yourself you can get everything done in one day, you pumped yourself up, but then everything came crashing down. You end up with too many things that are both important and urgent.

This leads us to the first thing you need to understand in order to make your time work for you: you need a system that keeps your priorities in check. Something that keeps you grounded and accountable. We found that one of the best systems that does such a thing is Eisenhower's Decision Matrix.

So, the Matrix is named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, who famously said, "What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important." Now, the Matrix is designed to help you identify what is important and urgent, and what can be put off until later. The Matrix consists of four quadrants, each representing a different level of urgency and importance.

The first quadrant, in the upper left corner, is for tasks that are both important and urgent. These are tasks that require immediate attention, such as deadlines or emergencies. The second quadrant, in the upper right-hand corner, is for tasks that are important but not urgent. These tasks may not require immediate attention, but they're still important and should be prioritized. Examples of these tasks include long-term projects, goal setting, and planning.

The third quadrant, in the lower left corner, is for tasks that are urgent but not important. These tasks may seem urgent, but they don't contribute to your long-term goals or mission. Examples of these tasks include interruptions, phone calls, and emails. The fourth and final quadrant, in the lower right-hand corner, is for tasks that are neither urgent nor important. These tasks can be put off until later or just eliminated altogether. Examples of these tasks include mindless scrolling on social media, watching TV, or checking your email constantly.

Now, the problem is most people spend the majority of their time and resources in the bottom two quadrants, or on the non-important issues. They spend time in the third quadrant doing busy work that isn't important but feels like work. For example, all of those meetings that could have been an email fit into this quadrant. Most people who work nine-to-five jobs spend the vast majority of their time here too. Sure, it makes you feel like you're working, but nothing is really getting done.

The reason people love spending time here is because they don't have the pressure of results. They prepare, analyze, discuss, brainstorm, but they don't have anything to show for it. When they get tired, they default to the last quadrant. Now, if you want to start taking control of your time, you need to move all of your resources into the top quadrants.

Now, to take this to the next level, we suggest you buy a small whiteboard—something that fits right beside your desk. Get some Post-it notes and write your tasks on them, then place them into their respective quadrants. In the urgent and important section, you'll have just one thing you're doing right now. Avoid filling up this space with everything you consider urgent and important because if everything you have to do is urgent and important, then none of it is.

So, make sure you only have one thing there. Add the rest into the second quadrant, and as soon as you're done with the first thing, move a task from the second quadrant into the first one. Your main goal is to always finish what you started and know what you're doing next. You need to finish what's in the first quadrant faster than you fill up the second quadrant.

Now, there's one more important question you need to ask yourself in order to differentiate between what's urgent and important and what's urgent but not important. And that question is: can someone else do it? Can you train someone from your team to do it? Can you hire someone to do it? Can you automate this process? This is actually how highly effective entrepreneurs manage their time. Since their decision making impacts the whole company, they need to spend their time only on things that are important and only they can do.

You need to resist the urge to think, "I'll do it myself," if someone else can do it just fine. That is, if you really want to make the most of your time. Now, some things to consider here: when all of your problems are both important and urgent, this means one of two things. One: you didn't give yourself enough buffer zone to handle things you didn't know that you didn't know. This is extremely important. There will always be things that don't work out the way you expect. Life will always throw you a curveball.

Or two: you let important but not urgent problems become important and urgent. Just because you don't have to do something right now doesn't mean you shouldn't. This is how you avoid making them urgent, and this is what keeps people from getting control over their time. They look at things that are not urgent and just let them be.

So, you have this Decision Matrix to help you prioritize your tasks and give you a clear idea of what you need to do and in what order. This takes care of the part where you overestimate what you can do in a single day. Now, when it comes to underestimating what you can do in a year, people have a problem of understanding how the compounding effect works.

The same way a house is built brick by brick, a great life where you're in control of your time is built day by day. What you do every day amounts to how your year looks like. Life is a marathon, not a race. So, you need to make every single day worth it. You'll always be better off doing a little bit every day rather than trying to cram in as many things as possible in the final week of the year.

We mentioned earlier in the video that people tend to not rise to their expectations. Instead, they fall to their level of preparation. In other words, it doesn't matter what you hope to achieve in a year; the only thing that matters is what systems you put in place to make that thing happen. For example, let's say you want to read 10 books this year. Well, if you haven't read that many before in your life, this might seem like a daunting task. That is if you don't have any systems put in place.

But consider this: the average book has about 250 pages. The average person spends about 30 minutes in the bathroom each day, and the average person can read about 25 pages in 30 minutes. So, in other words, you can finish up three books a month just by having them in the bathroom. That means 30 books by the end of the year. As a comparison, the average American reads about 12 books a year. So, look, okay, imagine reading twice as many books as the average American just by having them in the bathroom and reading a couple of pages when you take a dump in the morning.

That's why people underestimate how much they can do in a year. They don't see how these systems work in the long run. Couple this thinking with that Decision Matrix to help you prioritize your stuff, and you'll see how you feel like you have 100 hours in a day compared to everyone else.

We hope you learned something valuable here today, Alex. Sir, we'll see you back here tomorrow. Thanks for spending some time with us today, Alexa. We're so glad you did. If you found value in today's video, please give us a like, hit that bell icon to never miss an upload, and hey, don't forget to subscribe.