Learning balance in life is extremely challenging.
We have a hundred things to take care of at once and there never seem to be enough hours in the day. We struggle to juggle work and our personal lives, sometimes in addition to school, and when bedtime rolls around we find we’ve failed to make time for the things we want to do.
Whether you want to learn to speak Spanish or you simply want to carve out time in your day to knit before bed, making time in your schedule to learn a new skill requires balance and effort. It’s often quite difficult to make that time. However, if there’s a will there is a way, and this might be the way to do it:
Step 1: Track your schedule
How much time are you spending throughout your day doing productive things, and how much time are you wasting with unproductive nonsense? You might be floored with the amount of time you waste procrastinating.
For a week, keep a schedule of your chunks of free time and your chunks of work time. If you’re a student, how are your classes spaced, when are you prioritizing homework, and how much are you procrastinating? If you work during the day, how are you spending your time after work? Is it spent watching television, or do you use it to do chores?
Segregate your time into blocks and figure out which blocks can be moved around and which ones can be entirely removed.
Step 2: Prioritize
What are you doing with your free time that is absolutely necessary and urgent, and what gets time that isn’t at all important?
Segregate those blocks from step 1 into the following categories:
Urgent and important: these are the tasks you need to complete as they come up. These are the urgent emails your boss sends you and the doctor’s appointment you need to attend for that rash “down there.” Get these things out of the way as soon as they come up.
Important but not urgent: parking tickets and organizing spreadsheets probably fall into this category. If it can be taken care of in a few seconds, like the parking ticket, take care of it now.
Urgent but not important: these are the tasks that can be split with others. For example, if you live with a roommate, you can take turns carrying out these tasks, like doing the dishes. Likewise, if you have an intern or employee that works below you, you can assign this task to them for completion.
Unimportant and not urgent: these are the tasks you do throughout your day to procrastinate everything above. Remove these “tasks.”
Once you’ve blocked your week into chunks and categorized the pieces by rank of importance, it’s time for implementation.
Step 3: Shift your blocks to make free time
Work on removing the unnecessary pieces from your day that are neither urgent nor important. Shift the urgent things to be completed earlier in the week if possible. Make sure you’re completing the urgent but not important as it arises rather than pushing those pieces off.
With a little bit of effort, you should be easily able to add an extra hour and a half to the end of your day to spend your time learning something new. This is your time and your life so make sure you use it accordingly. Always remember to make time for the important things in life, whether its learning to paint or spending time with family. Life’s too short to spend it sitting in front of the television.
[Featured Image Credit: Thought Catalog]