The EnvisionaryWhilst you can’t physically get more time available than 24 hours a day, you can absolutely craft better use of your time and energy in your day as this guide shows.
If you are wondering how to find more time and energy in your day then this is the start guide challenge for you.
At Richly we always look at ‘out the box’ ideas and techniques to help you ‘create change’ in your life and in the world, as positive change comes from looking at routine and convention differently, and this start guide challenge focuses on finding more time and energy in your day so you can focus your time and energy on something more purposeful and impacting.
We have created a list of ideas to help you find more time and energy each day, plus have added other resources such as books, apps, and other useful article links to help you find more time and energy in your day.
Before you know it you will be a time and energy productivity master!
< Bookmark this actionable guide as a reference or share it with friends you think might find it useful.
40 Actionable Ways To Find More Time And Energy (Productivity) In Your Day
Some of the tips you may have heard of before but the key is in putting these tips into action (which is where the 7-day challenge comes in), whilst others will be refreshing and creative ways to think about utilising your time and energy better. We hope they will help you get out of a time or energy-sapping rut, and help you think and act differently.
To find out more about one of these useful time and energy management techniques/lifehacks then click on its link (if it has one).
Before The Start Of Your Day:
1) Prepare Tomorrow Tonight
We are groggy in the morning. Write the list of what you need to get done tomorrow the day or night before, so when you wake up you can get into action before the urge to procrastinate kicks in. Prep your meals the night before, or have your clothes ready on the end of the bed if you have to rush out in the morning.
At The Start Of Your Day:
2) Get Up Energised
We hear the ‘get up early’ lifehack a lot. It can help but only when we are alert to that time, which might take some adjusting if a night owl. It’s much better to ensure we get up energised, as the first few hours in the day are the most important. We need to break that fast and use our replenished energy well.
3) Handle Things All At Once
Don’t go and check emails or news throughout the day. Only do it once or twice at set times.
4) Remove Technology From Your Wake Up Call
Avoid watching the news, or scrolling through social media when you wake up. If you don’t want to lose you focused energy from sleep quickly then this is imperative.
5) Have A Hearty Breakfast
Nothing gives you energy for the rest of the day like a good hearty, healthy breakfast. There are a million blogs on what to eat to gain energy, so check a few of them out for some ideas.
Getting Organised Lifehacks:
6) Understand Time & Energy Balance Efficiency
Some tasks, like having a meeting, might appear like a good use of time but is it? Often many meetings are a complete time waste if they don’t lead towards forward-thinking action. That time could be spent adding time elsewhere, such as in meditating or exercise (which often create energy, which is worth the time spent on it). The balance of time and energy can be paramount towards a productive day.
7) Remove Notifications
Do you really need a notification for everything in your life? Minimise them down to only the important, and remove everything else. Or switch them off completely, you likely won’t miss most of them.
8) Turn Off Technology Throughout The Day
If you are always connected to wifi then you will likely find you spend most of your day on the internet, and not always productively. It’s like buying a larger suitcase for travel – you will likely find a way to fill it – so buy something smaller and force yourself to cut down on things.
9) Set A Cleaning Day/Time
Rather than always trying to keep everything spotless, it would be more efficient to create a set time for cleaning each week. Organise repeated blocks like this, such as having Sunday as your domestic duty morning.
10) Set A Deadline To Be Held Accountable
This one might sound boring but it’s simply one of the most effective methods you can use to ensure you get something done in your allocated time.
When people started working from home more they found they got less done, or more accurately, found they went over their normal work hours to get things done, because at work they are held accountable by a schedule.
When working from home they weren’t used to being self-motivators or self-disciplinarians and so their time went over more and their energy suffered too as their work and home life started becoming more entangled.
Setting a deadline, or sticking to a working schedule, can really help.
11) Use A Checklist
There’s an air of satisfaction when you tick something off your list, but using a checklist is effective because it helps you know progress towards a goal is being made.
It can feel too easy to give up on a big goal and feel like you haven’t got anything done if it’s not fully complete, so checklists can help show the incremental progress.
They will also help ensure you are working on something important rather than just urgent.
12) Delete Something Each Day
This doesn’t have to be a to-do list task, but it could be ensuring you are becoming more minimised each day, and this especially applies today with digital detoxing and digital minimisation.
Removing an app a day for a week (or a month if you have so many apps) can help you feel like the load is getting lighter. You can also apply this with the ‘Be Decisive’ tip and just get rid of 15 or so apps you barely use right now.
Job done.
If you have time-sucking apps and games that aren’t really adding any value to your day then it’s best to delete them, and you’ll be happy in the amount of time you have free for other things.
Time Saving Lifehacks:
13) Kill Two Birds With One Stone
Do two tasks together to save time. For example, cook in bigger batches so you can freeze the leftovers for later saving more cooking.
14) Be Decisive And Move On
Limit the amount of time researching something to buy, just check it within a set time and make a decision and then get on with other things.
15) Delegate & Teamwork
Find others to do tasks with. One of the biggest mistakes in productivity is to think everything has to be done yourself, whereas we get more than twice as much done when we simply have a partner. Have a team and so much more time is freed up when that team is synergised effectively.
I always used to think I had to do everything myself, but today I achieve so much more in less time because of the power of leverage.
16) Reorganise Time To Suit Your Day
Do you need to sit in traffic in your car for 1-2 hours a day?
Most people do because they are all leaving at the same time, but if you left much earlier to cut out the traffic you could park up nearby and then go for a walk or run before work.
Have a smoothie ready too and you’d hit your office fresh and energised with exercise and another meal done instead of cranky and rushed because you only just made it through the ‘nightmare’ traffic.
17) Shop At Quiet Times
Apply time management to when you do daily chores too. Why shop for food when the line is long, why not go on a lunch break or at the end of the day? Supermarkets are open late these days and some good deals can be found too before things are thrown away.
18) Use Voice Over Screen Searches
The world will likely change towards this method of search in the near future anyway, as we will become used to searching for information through voice search, but it can be a good habit to develop now for saving time and energy too.
When we are locked to our screens the amount of time we lose searching for something can be a lot longer than if we just speak it. The technology might not be quite there yet but it will be soon enough.
Energy Saving Lifehacks:
19) Eat Energy & Health Promoting Foods
This one has been written about to the moon and back and for good reason. Eat well and your mind and body will thank you. It’s very tempting to reach for the unhealthy snacks as it saves on time, but it ends up counteracting that with the energy it takes away from you, so your time saved becomes time lost in unproductive hours that follow.
20) Sleep
There’s arguably no better way to gain more energy than to simply ensure we get a good night’s sleep. We might think we are losing time but this is one time block we have to grey out as non-negotiable. Like eating unhealthily, we can try to gain more ‘time’ by cutting out sleep but it will just result in more time being used suboptimally.
21) Exercise At Your Peak Energy & Natural Rythym
It sounds obvious but the amount of times we exercise when our energy isn’t at its greatest is baffling. We end up feeling exhausted after it rather than energised.
22) Create Positive Energy
A simple but hugely effective way to have more energy in your day is to create it, generate it from where you are right now. Energy is a superpower in how we can craft it from anywhere (but it can also be sapped just as quickly).
You could simply smile and energy would be generated. Likewise, just enjoy your successes and failures, feel good about what you achieve and what you can learn from failures and you create more abundance of energy that can be used throughout your day.
Feel miserable and stressed over not having the success or life you want and you will only find your energy becomes depleted quicker making it harder for you to achieve in your day.
23) ‘Don’t Try Anything’ Day
You could consider this a reset. Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is simply to do nothing.
Sure, it won’t get rid of all the tasks still to do but productivity is a question of time and energy balance and sometimes we just need a good rest to give us back some energy.
Also, when we take our mind off a task our mind might well solve a problem easier in the background through whitespacing.
Habit Forming Lifehacks:
24) Create Time For Abundance
We might think spending time on personal development, exercise, food, and relationships each day leave no time for work but it actually creates abundance in clarity and energy within ourselves and with others.
25) Think Ergonomics & Give An Item A Designated Home
Develop routine habits of putting something back in the same place so it becomes automatic and leaves less to tidy up later. By giving an item a designated home you will save a lot of time over time.
Do you have cups, sugar, tea and you kettle all in one place, or are you moving all around the kitchen for each part?
26) Write Down What You Think
Rather than constantly jogging your memory on what you need to do you could develop the habit of writing down what you think. Some prefer digital to-do lists but having a simple notebook can be all you need. Focus on making the list empty by the end of the day, so don’t overload it with too many to-dos or you simply won’t get them done.
27) Remove Items From Todo Lists Without Doing Them
If you removed some to-do list items would they turn up on the list again or would you find they aren’t needed anyway? Remove trivial lists you don’t need. The same goes for belongings in your home, pack them up and see if you need them again, you may be surprised by how many stay in the box.
Overcome Blocks:
28) Sort Your Fears Out First
We could spend a lifetime trying to be productive with our time but still find we can’t effectively get a few things done each day, and it could be nothing to do with our time keeping ability but more to do with our own fears and lack of confidence. This is where energy can be drained and our time seamingly disappears out of nowhere. Imagine worrying about a meeting coming up in your day, and then you spend so much time preparing for it. Well, that’s a lot more time wasted than just the time dedicated to the meeting. It’s well worth building up our self-esteem and our anti-fragility to become stronger with each challenge, rather than fear challenges and see our time and energy disappear because of that fear.
29) Eat The Frog
Get your hardest task done first.
30) Find A Buddy To Hold You Accountable
It can also help to find another buddy, a work colleague, or a complete stranger (like through Focusmate) to help you stay focused and work within allotted time spaces.
Time & Energy Tools:
31) Use a Timer
Remaining focused is one of the hardest things to do in such a choice filled attention economy, so using a timer to keep us on task can be one of the best tools you can buy. The Pomodoro technique can really help.
32) Use Productivity Tools For Automation
we are blessed (and sometimes hindered) with so many apps and tools out there to choose from. We should remember to be decisive (#6) when picking an app, as taking forever to test loads out defeats the point of being productive with our time. Yet, there’s certainly some apps worth checking out that when used right can help us automate our productivity flow (see below). Automating things like bill payments will save you a headache and a potential drop in your credit rating score.
33) Make Your Priorities Stand Out
We have noticeboards and post-it notes in different colours for a reason. Don’t make everything a priority, but highlight really important goals and deadlines to ensure you keep them at the top of your mind. If you don’t have priorities then many tasks will just end up fighting for attention in your mind. Sort out the really important ones through a simple colour-code method, but don’t set too many or spend an age over picking your colours.
34) Use Focus Music In The Background
This doesn’t help everyone but some people say it keeps them focused on their tasks because it helps relax the mind away from the fear of doing something. With music playing their mind can be directed towards active focus.
Using Time & Energy Techniques:
35) Use The 5-minute Timeboxing Rule –
36) Use The Einstein Time Technique –
37) Don’t Forget The 80/20 Rule
No time management list is complete without the essential pareto principle of dividing the 20% of tasks that create 80% of the impact. There’s often a lot of deadwood within what we think is essential but when we truly measure the result of our actions we can see that we likely have to focus on certain areas that are much more productive than others.
38) Use This ADHD Guide To Getting Organised
If you suffer from ADHD attention disorders then you might find this Adult ADHD Guide To Getting Organised In A Distracting World (That Can Help Anyone) useful.
39) Don’t Multitask, Use Quick Adaption Instead
Multitasking is not the same as killing two birds with one stone. Our minds are built to deal with tasks sequentially and it is actually more or less impossible for us to do any two tasks at once more effectively than if we did one task after another. It’s a bit like having a well organised kitchen and a disorganised one. In a well thought out ergonomic layout you will cook your meal much quicker, in a messy one you will be more likely to waste energy finding things, burn something and have to start again, losing more time and energy. However, when you learn to apply Quick Adaption Technique you can mimic the idea of multitasking effectively without actually multitasking.
A Final Tip:
40) Don’t Be Obsessed With Time Management
This might sound a bit contradicting considering all the lifehacks listed to help people manage time better, but you can read all you like about time management but it won’t help unless you apply and implement the tips.
The Find More Time And Energy ‘1 Week To Productive’ Challenge
There’s really no point in reading lists of lifehacking tips towards getting more time and energy out of our day if we don’t also seek to actually implement them.
While doing all of the tips in one sweep would likely lead towards a huge effort of time and energy being wasted, as we simply can’t process everything in practice as we can in just reading a list, the best solution would be to incrementally add some suggestions into your day.
Therefore, this challenge is a simple one, but an effective one.
Pick 7 items from the lifehack list above and each day implement one action into your day. So, on Day 1 you only have to choose one, but on Day 2 choose two (or choose the first day's one again and add the second day to it). Continue until on Day 7 you are implementing 7 of the tasks/lifehacks.
Then you could do the 7-week challenge that goes into help in building up techniques like the 80/20 principle, quick adaption, timeboxing, and/or Pomodoro technique into your day to complete the change. (with one week to reflect in middle, so 2 months overall)
As well as trying this challenge you can also read up on more insightful and long-form articles on this site, plus check out the useful resources and article link suggestions around finding more time and energy in your day.
Useful Resources That Will Help You Find More Time And Energy In Your Day
Products & Apps That Can Help You Find More Time And Energy
To-do List Apps – Todoist, Wunderlist
Time Management Apps – Trello, Asana, Monday, Airtable
Books That Can Help You Find More Time And Energy
Changemakers & Articles In This Area
For Health & Energy Fitness Advice For Over 50s (https://overfiftyandfit.com)
Our aim is to provide the most useful resources to help our readers take action towards creating change. If you have an interesting take on how to create more time and energy in your day and want it published on our site then contact us here.