6 Time Saving Hacks I Use Every Day

You have goals! You have dreams! You already have too much on your plate! So how can you set things up to save time every day so that you can spend more time doing the things you want to do…and less wandering around trying to find stuff?

Here are six time-saving hacks that I use every single day to help my life run a bit more smoothly. Yes, some of them took time to set up, but once they’re set up, they save tons of time in the long-run.

1. Have a bedtime routine and a morning routine. I’ve talked about this before, and I cannot over-emphasize how having good routines to start and end your day can help you save time in the long run.
2. Utilize a better calendar. I prefer Google Calendar for many reasons. The biggest of which is that I can have many different calendars that focus on different types of tasks or are shared with different people. I can choose to look at as many or as few of those at a time as I need to. But having them all in one place means I can keep up with what’s going on in all of the different facets of my life. In one place. Plus routines can be set on recurring calendar events, so that I no longer have to think about them, but my phone beeps to remind me I have an event to attend to.
3. Have a WorkFlow document. For tasks that you do repeatedly (but not every day), have a workflow document. This is basically a SOP that gives step by step instructions (I like to include embedded links so that I can open every site I need from the same doc.) Not only do you not have to reteach yourself every time you need to do the task, but you can also hand the document to someone else to do the task, if need be.
4. Automate everything you can. I’ve also talked about this before. Not just your business processes, but also as many things in your daily life as you can. The fewer things you have to think about on a regular basis, the more you can think about and spend time on the things you want to spend time on.
5. Living in chaos? Organize one thing/area/cabinet every week until you have established new organized habits. Once you know where your stuff is and can reasonably expect it to stay there, you won’t spend as much time hunting for items.
6. Use Time Blocking to better utilize your time. Schedule all of your errands for Wednesdays. Schedule all of your meetings for Mondays. Schedule all of your phone calls for Thursdays. It’s a lot easier to sink into a flow state when you’re spending 1+ hours doing the same thing. And you can save a lot of gas when you run all of your errands on the same day.

Taking a little bit of time once a week or once a month to set one of these things into motion and then focus on making it a habit can save you lots of time over the next several years.