Take Control of Your Time with the 168 Hours Method

1. Introduction: There are 168 hours in a week, even if you work for eight hours a day, commute for to sleep for aids and spent five on everything else like eating, family, exercising, watching TV. You still have 27 hours left per week to pursue your dream. Work on your hobbies or just to do something that brings more meaning to your life. Hi everyone. I'm Joseph Mavericks. I'm an online content creator and I started my entrepreneurship journey with blogging a few years ago, while I still had a nine to five job back then I quickly realized that growing up blog and the business on the side all the wild tending to my growing responsibilities at my office job, It's not going to be manageable unless I started to drastically rethink the way I managed my time. Time management is extremely important. Every day we'll get the same amount of a commodity that is invaluable, in unexplainable, no matter how late it isn't a day when you wake up, no matter if you're busy, procrastinating of both, no matter if you're rich, poor, educated, and educated, motivated, or unmotivated, lucky you're under key. There is one commodity that is distributed to each and every one of us equally every day time. Ever since I changed my approach to the way I manage my time, my life has honestly been changed. And in this course I want to tell you about the method and the tools are used to get here. Time is the one commodity Nobody can have more of. We are all about 24 hours in the day. You meet Bill Gates, your boss. Everybody gets the same amount of time. And what we do with this time is up to us, there is not any major incentive to spend your time in the smartest way possible, unless you're trying to accomplish things in life. Time-saving are spending is not directly rewarded in our society. Lot of people say that money can buy more time, but that is only true in a figurative sense. If you have money, you can make things more efficient. But realistically there is no interest rate on time. You can't invest five hours to up to get an extra two at the end of the day, nobody has 26 hour days. You can't pay for your groceries with time wire transfer time to people or write a check of 1 million hours to a business partner. You can't get a time discount or a tank cashback or fly miles because you spent five hours doing something. Humans tend to live on average for 80 years. But even if we had a lifespan of 1000 years, we'd probably feel like it's too little. We just don't want things to end. But tiny is a finite resource for everyone. Every day, nobody can take your time away from you. Every day you get 24 hours and again, you decide how you spend, when it comes to spending that time. You'll hear a lot of people say that they don't have time, or at least not as much as they wish they did to spend on the things that matter to them. But there's another way to look at it. A 168 hours, you have more time than you think is an amazing book by Laura van der com. And I can honestly say that this book changed the way I managed my weeks and by extending my life, I highly recommend anyone to read this book. Based on my insights from the book, I created the free tool called the 168, our spreadsheet to help you manage your time according to Laura funder cramps technique. And this is what this course is about. People say I don't have time all the time to justify why they didn't do the things they should have done or wanted to do. But what's really happening is a lot of people don't have priorities. So it's better to say it's not my priority at the moment that you say I don't have time. We have plenty of time to do that one favor to a friend or to start this project we wanted to start with just didn't consider those things as having a high enough priority to actually get to them. We most likely simply decided to use our time to do other things. And that's the path I, myself followed for many years before starting to prioritize my time in this course, you'll learn how to use my 168 hours spreadsheet. And we'll also talk about all the tips, tricks and advantages of looking at your time on it. 168, our timeline, which is a week rather than 24 hours, which is a date. This way, you can decide to spend your time on things that are priority for you. I always like to give it that all assignments for your courses because you can then share it with the community on Skillshare, which is motivating and rewarding. And it also improves commitment to have a little something to do on the side while following the course videos. So with that in mind, the one assignment for this entire course and the project you'll be able to share in the project section once you're done watching is to have your own before and after spreadsheets. As you will see at the bottom of the 168, our spreadsheet, there is a before tab and an after-tax. Before tab is where you track your time, just living your life as it is right now. The after-tax is the same spreadsheet, but that's going to show the ideal scenario, the improved version of how you could spend your 168 hours based on the insights you learned from this course, I hope that sharing that improvement process will motivate you to start managing your time better, to stick to your new schedule better. And I will see you in the next section of the course when you're ready. 2. Where is your time going?: The first step in claiming your time back according to the 168 hour time management technique, is to see where your time is going. And the key here is to look at your time use on the weekly timeframe. Why weekly? Well, because when trying to solve a problem, the bigger samples of data give a clearer picture of the possible solutions. Week is seven days, 24 hours times seven is 168 hours. And it makes it a lot easier to see patterns and blocks of time under 168, our timeline than a 24 hour timeline. Once you open the spreadsheet, make sure you go to File, make a copy to be able to edit the file yourself. Once you get access to the document, there are two and only two areas you should edit, the green one and the blue one. The green area is used to fill in the name of the activities you want to do. It is prefilled with common activities. Everyone does like sleeping, spending time in the bathroom, the groceries. If you have more specific activities that are not listed, feel free to add them in the empty green orders. If some of this stuff is not relevant for you, then feel free to delete the row as well. The blue area is used to fill in the time you spend on each activity. You can choose to input the time daily, weekly, or monthly. You can use decimals and the white columns on the right of the table are only here for indicating purposes. You shouldn't try to edit them. The point of having this daily, weekly, monthly column is to give you multiple units of measurement, so to speak. For instance, if you don't know how many times per day you spend doing the groceries, but you estimate it's around three hours per week, then you only need to fill in the blue weekly column. If you spend 30 minutes per day in the shower, you only need to fill in the blue daily column. You don't need to calculate that for the weekly or monthly e-mail. This spreadsheet does that on its own. If you add more than one value per line, an error message will show up any errors column. If you're not sure how much time you spend doing things, which is a very common issue for many people, especially when looking at a weekly timeline, the only way to get a clearer picture is to start manually tracking your timing, the time log or journal or a notebook. Do this for a few weeks and in the end, put your data in a spreadsheet. This is an amazing tag management exercise and it will open your eyes on where your time is actually going. When I tried the ticket myself years ago, I couldn't believe it. So every time you come across an activity that takes times in your day, create a new entry in your journal and start tracking how much time it takes you every day. One last thing. Overall, if you don't have a precise idea of how much time you spend doing something, it's better to over-estimate than underestimate if you think you spend 45 minutes a day commuting, but it could be more than put one hour in the spreadsheet. The last thing you want is a false positive telling you you have more time than you thought while it's not the case. That's it for this section of the course. In the next section, we'll discuss the results you're going to get after a few days or weeks of tracking your data, essentially, we'll see whether or not you have any time left. 3. To have or not to have time: Once you have a bunch of data and you input everything in this spreadsheet, you will see the graph on the right side of your screen update as you enter more values. Once you're done inputting your activities, you will be in either one of those two situations. One, you still have time left if the vertical bar doesn't stretch all the way to 168, the top number. That's amazing. You didn't even know it, but you actually still have time to do things. Or Option two, you don't have any time left. You have a very busy life and very little time available to do things at the moment. Whether you actually are motivated to start working on your projects is out of the question because you don't have a minute for yourself in the first place. However, not all is doomed. First, double-check your data. Did you input everything correctly? Did you properly log your timing a journal for activities you're not sure of. Second, it's time to optimize your time, use each activity one-by-one. Once in awhile you will run into one that can either take less time or a lot less time or be completely removed from your schedule up until now, everything is simple math. You're trying to get as big of a gap as possible between the total amount of time you spend doing things and the number 168, the rest will come later for some inspiration, here are a common activities that can be optimized to help you spend less time on them. And as a result, gain tieing over your 168 hour week in groceries, for instance, you can do them online instead of going to distort for cooking, you can meal prep your week instead of cooking every day. Sleeping when it comes to sleeping, sleeping in on the weekends is overrated. It's actually healthier to have a sleep routine that changes as little as possible bathroom time, make your routine more efficient by having an organized bathroom and making sure you don't run out of the basic stuff like razors, shampoo, toothpaste. If you spend a lot of time in public transport, look into more efficient ways of computing, like electric scooter biking might be an option for you. Combine activities if you spend two hours per day reading, but one of them is during your warn our daily commute, then these two activities cancel each other. The reading ruin your spreadsheets should read one, not two hours and you just save 60 minutes of your time just like that when it comes to the time you spend at your job, especially with the coronavirus pandemic. More and more people work remotely while still being under contract with the 95 type employer. So talk to your management at your work and explain to them why you feel like this is a better option for you. Make sure you prepare your argumentation well, and that you will be able to maintain at least the same level of productivity than at the office. And now here are common activities that you can easily spend 90% less time on or completely removed from your schedule online time, oysters, Facebook, Instagram, snapchats are highly addictive time wasting activities. They're not easy to stop, but there are definitely worth stopping. Socializing your relationships are the heaviest component of your life, so choose them wisely after work, fun and Saturday afternoon beer doesn't have to happen if you have better things to do reading the news, most of the news outlets are never neutral and always buy used purposefully or not. When something big happens, you'll hear about it if it's important enough, there are many other options than the news to try to understand the world and what is happening around it, mainly through books. The same goes for TV, except that comes with even more unnecessary noise filters, biases, and a ton of useless content. You see optimizing time. It's not an easy process. Bringing about change takes a long time. You won't be able to incorporate online groceries, meal prep, less socializing, and the more efficient bathroom routine in the span of a week, not to mention closing your Instagram account or stopping to tweet every 30 minutes. Those things take time, give it time and be patient slowly but surely you will be able to bring down your total time is spent doing these things more often than not though, you will realize you have more time than you thought you had. So maybe you don't even have to optimize some of your activities like we just talked about. Regardless, once you make extra time, you need to figure out what to do with it and not squandered away. And that's exactly what we're going to discuss in the next section of the course. 4. What to do with all this time?: What to do with this newly acquired free time? The most relevant number to look at here is the time left per week. Don't despair when you see only have mirror hour per day left to work on exciting projects. When you would also like to relax once in a while. Look at the weekly time lift seven hours is plenty to both relax and work. We will call this your weekly spare time. Now, assuming you're not squandering away this time on Netflix, social media, YouTube, and all that stuff which don't get me wrong. I'm also guilty of a times assuming that vary in mind that it's always better to focus on two to three activities to dedicate your weekly spare time to. Here's why. Number one, The human brain is not designed to multitask, even if you have a two-wheel to try and do everything at the same time, you most likely will fail. Our brains are much better at focusing on one or few tasks at a time rather than trying to execute ten in time. Number two, you will handicap yourself. If you have too many projects to work on, you won't know where to start and how to organize your time. Both because you will be overwhelmed and because there will be too many possibilities. So keep it simple. Limit yourself. Number three, you will make very slow if any progress. There is no point in splitting five hours of free time per week into more than three activities. Beyond that number, you will just have a bit more than one hour and a half per week on each activity and that's just too low to make any progress. With that in mind, here are my recommendations. If you have, for instance, more than ten hours, less per week, pick three activities to focus where we'd be spare time on. Maximum, if you have five to ten hours left, pick two activities. And if you have less than five hours left, pick one and only one activity. Now you don't have to split the time equally between each activity, but you just can't do everything. To give you an example, here's what my list of things I want to do with all my free time used to look like back when I was working on implementing down and it's extended outward time management technique in my life, I wanted to swim, volunteer sign-up for social club, get better at chess, draw, learn Chinese science, learn a third language, start blogging, trained for a marathon bike at least 25 kilometers per weekend. Tinker with the electronics. Bear in mind that at the time I had nearly 20 hours of free time per week. That would be two hours per activity per week. Not bad, but again, it's also important to be realistic when it comes to being able to keep up. At the time I wanted to run a marathon training for swimming and biking on the weekend. I might as well If dedicated my free time to try thumb training on top of virtually training for a triathlon, I wanted to learn to play chess better, tinker with electronic store and Chinese science, just to name a few. This was clearly not manageable. I had to prioritize and that's what the next section of this course is going to be about. 5. How to prioritize: I prioritize my time use around only a few activities by creating what I call my ultimate prioritization cornerstones. Your ultimate prioritization cornerstones are things that you want and will highly prioritize in your life. They have really high value to yourself, and they'd come before a lot of things on your priority list. The best way to choose your ultimate prototype and cornerstones when you have a lot of options like me, is to think a lot about each one. And the best way to do this in my case was to write down my thoughts about each option. Here's what I wrote down about each of my options. Swim. I do want to improve my swimming, but I'm a bit late in the season and most swimming clubs don't accept newcomers anymore. Besides, I live by the sea and I can go swim there, maybe swimming classes can wait. Volunteer. I really want to try volunteering. I've been saying it for so long and I'm finally in a situation where I can do it. I have researched existing organizations, I'm ready for this. This is definitely something important for me. Sign up for a social club. I want to meet more people and get out of my comfort zone when it comes to social interactions. But this is the activity that is the most likely to go over the schedule time. Because social outings and gatherings always take longer than expected. Play better chess. I do want to get better at chess, but I don't think it's a priority to the point of dedicating so much time to it. I can play once in a while on the iPad. Draw. I always draw once in awhile anyway. I feel like keeping it up, but I don't feel like prioritizing it over other things. Learn Chinese signs. I just loved visual memory challenges. I have this app on my phone I can use when I have a bit of time while commuting, for instance, it shouldn't be a top priority. Learn a third language, that this requires a big commitments and I'm not sure I'm ready for it yet. Blogging. I've been blogging on and off for awhile. I really feel like I finally want to give it a real shot. I want to commit to it, play my content, research interesting things to write about, interact with an audience as slowly but surely builds to base for this, both in terms of technicality and motivation. I feel like I need to start to get more seriously trained for a marathon. This is a my life to do. I need to do it and I'm in a situation where it can afford to spend time on it. I just have to go out the door and running the park nearby. I can't see any reason to not prioritize this. It takes a decent amount of time. I'm motivated about it. If I succeed, I will check something off my life to do bike at least 25 kilometers per weekend. I bike most weekends and I don't feel like I should pressure myself in doing it every weekend, especially if I'm going to train for a marathon next to this, I should take it as it comes with the biking. There's no secret here. Some options have to go away and some old state. You can also rank each one event with a score out of ten and only keep the three best ranked ones. After all my writing, I decided the three things I was going to prioritize. We're number one, blogging. Number two, training for a marathon, and number three, volunteering. I also have to 10% type buffer for the unexpected. The best way to do that for me was to completely remove online time oysters from my agenda and replace them with a buffer to do 10% of what I wish I could do. It's a small rule I came up with for myself, be used of free time to do more of what you wish you had more time to do, if that makes sense. So once in a while, I will do a bunch of those things id prioritized. I will still play chess, learn Chinese signs. Those things still make me happy, even though they're not a priority. I still enjoy doing those things and I highly encourage you to do more of what makes you have to use. Well, that's pretty much about it for the 168 hours time management technique, you should now have all the tools and tips in your hands to not only figure out where your time is going, but also to manage your time better and reallocate it based on your priorities and stood that makes you happy. In the next and final section, we'll cover a few final thoughts on time put in perspective, and it will be the end of the course. So see you there when you're ready. 6. Time put in perspective: Little recap about time put in perspective throughout my own learning process of turkey, my time using optimizing it. I researched and compiled the most revealing facts about time management. I always get back to them when I need to fill the motivation to use my time wisely and to keep my upward momentum. Here are those fangs. Number one, monthly activities amount to little time when looked at on a weekly scale. Here's an example. When I started volunteering, I realized it was taking me from 10:00 AM to 04:00 PM on Saturdays. In the beginning, I thought this was a huge amount of time, but I realized I was only doing it once per month, twice tops. And once I put it in my updated down in 68 hours spreadsheet, I realized this six hours per month only amounts to 1.5 hours each week. And 12 hours only amounts to three hours per week when you look at it from this angle, I could definitely afford that, especially for something I wanted to prioritize and that was helpful to others. Number two, daily time adds up very quickly. On a weekly scale, one hour of wasted time per day shaves off seven hours of your week. That's huge and this was a perfect reason for me to start watching less YouTube, for instance. On the other hand, if you manage to save, let's say 90 minutes per day, that's ten hours and 30 minutes saved per week. That suit. Number three, the most meaningful things are the ones we'd spend the least time on. One thing about the vertical graphing their 168, our spreadsheet, it automatically source your activities from most consuming to least consuming. For most people, over 50% of the time will be spent sleeping and working at the office. All the things that bring you joy, the things you wish you could do more of usually sits somewhere much further down. At least I realized it was the case for me. In this course. We looked at ways to try and make more time in your weekly schedule. This process can enable you to do more of what you love. At the end of the day, it's about investing as much time as possible in yourself. That is thinks that fulfilled you. And once you love creativity, exercising family, friends, teaching, learning, writing, whatever it is, your goal is to bring as many of those tasks as possible to the top of the graph where they take more space on your personal time. Imagine if this big chunk of time of the graph was used for something more meaningful in your life. Now of course, not everybody is able to say, Screw it, quit their nine to five to find something more meaningful. Besides, even if you're 95 is not a perfect match, it might still bring you a sense of satisfaction. These days, the 95 lifestyle tends to be too easily categorized as negative. Unlike the common advice in the productivity and self-improvement spheres, you don't have to quit right away and go do something huge, but you just have to bring more meaning to your life. No matter what it is, you need to do more of what makes you happy. You only have one life. So make sure you enjoy it. 7. Recap & Outro: I guess there was one big lesson you should remember from this. It's beyond understanding the concept of time management and even knowing how to use certain tools around it. The most important thing is to understand that I don't have time is a very overused sentence. And that oftentimes what people really mean when they say that is they don't prioritize the things they want to do more of in their life. When you learn to manage your time better and structure your time use around your priorities. That's when you'll see through change happening. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this short course on my 160 that were spreadsheet. If you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, feel free to leave those in the corresponding section of the video down below. Feel free to also post your thoughts in the discussion section of this class and don't forget to leave a review and follow my profile as we're planning on launching more of those courses. Thanks a lot and see you around.