First Things First: Master Your Day.
People always ask me how I get so much done, and here's the truth: we all suck at estimating time, so you need to prioritize and budget your day like you would with money.
"How do you find time to do everything you do?!"
I would bet that I hear that once a month, at least.
If you're curious, strap in Bucko, because today is your lucky day. I will teach you life hacks, productivity secrets, and clever shortcuts to achieve the most fulfilling and accomplished life imaginable. 🙌 💥
The secret?
Humans really suck at a lot of things, and you're no different. Yep. I suck, and you suck too. Not exactly uplifting, I know, but it's more honest than the click-bait crap I just wrote a paragraph ago.
But before we dive into our countless shortcomings, I need to ground you in some hard graduate-level astrophysics:
The earth's rotation gives you and me something approximating 24 hours in a day.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the cast of Shark Tank, Mark Zuckerberg, and Oprah each only get 24 hours a day as well.
That single mind-blowing knowledge bomb should give you some hope. While there are people with advantages in life, no one has an advantage over the sands funneling through the hourglass.
I need you to start seeing time for what it truly is, a precious resource that we cannot get back. We can always find ways to get more money, but that clock is always ticking down to zero and there's no stopping that.
So if we can't make 28 hours in a day, and neither can Mr. Amazon, how does he accomplish so much? Well, the only thing we can do is to make the time we do have as intentional as possible.
Many would claim that their hot new productivity hack (and book series) is the secret, but I'll keep it much simpler: you've got a pie with 24 slices in it, buddy, and you have to ruthlessly figure out who's worth giving some dessert to.
Speaking of food...
You Suck At Estimating
Did you know humans, on average, underestimate the amount of food they eat by nearly 20% or 30%? In overweight individuals, this can be as much as 40% or more.
Did you also know that we do the same thing with the money we spend in a given month? I'm pretty sure you've forgotten about half of the streaming services you pay for. Reminder: you also pay for a gym membership.
We're also prone to underestimating how long various tasks will take us to complete. The Planning Fallacy is a bias we all have in predicting our own tasks. We assume we can get our thing done faster than the eventual reality, even for stuff we've done hundreds of times before.
In fact, one study asked students to estimate how long it would take them to finish their thesis with a worst-case and best-case scenarios. On average, each student said their best-case would be 27.4 days, with 48.6 days as their worst-case scenario.
The reality? 55.5 days.
Ouch.
Even our worst-case scenarios are optimistically wrong.
Realizing that we suck at estimating with our finger to the wind, one of the best ways for someone to lose weight is to have them track their food. In my own experiences, I'm shocked at the amount I actually consumed versus the amount I felt like I was eating.
Nachos are just so damned good.
Similarly, if you track your time in a day, I think you'll be amazed at both how long certain tasks actually took you, but also how much time you wasted on mindless shit that seemed important but didn't really matter.
Because we are terrible at estimating, that means that all the stuff we say yes to in a day only digs us into a deeper hole. The time in our day is fixed, so naturally, the tasks we think we can complete on that day continue to spill over to the next.
This has us perpetually feeling behind, and we never get to the things in life we want to do because that spillover of things we feel we have to do is only getting worse and worse each day.
Getting you out of this hole is going to take something radical.
It's going to take a budget 😱.
You Need a Budget
When we eat too much: "I need to go on a diet."
When we spend too much: "Honey, we need a budget."
When we piss away our time? "Oh shucks, I just wish there was more time in the day."
Do you see the wild incongruence here?
With nearly every part of our lives, we realize that we have to put forth a plan to have a fighting chance at preventing our health or our finances from going to shit.
You need a rough plan your day, or in the timeless words of Linkin Park, you'll watch the time go right out the window.
We make budgets for our finances because, at the end of the day, it's a zero-sum game. If you spend all your money, you're kinda done until you can get some more.
If you take away one thing from this article, may it be this…
The world is VERY good at taking your money. It's even better at taking your time.
Again, you can get more money, but you cannot get more time.
Each day is a gift with a challenge to live to the fullest. Organizing your day should not sound like a boring chore, but rather a tremendous opportunity to take back your time from a greedy world and finally do the things you want to do.
You've gotta figure out what's important to you and put that first – every single day.
The Schedule
Here's how almost 95% of my weekdays look:
5:00 am - Go to the gym. I'm nothing without my health, mentally and physically.
7:00 am - Get myself and the kids ready for the day. We all smell better as a result.
8:00 am - Take kids to school. They'll be driving soon enough, but for now, I enjoy this.
8:30 am - Start working. Obviously important. My family appreciates living indoors and warm showers.
12:30 pm - Get a quick lunch, maybe go outside for a few. Amazing how clarifying a short walk can be.
1:00 pm - Back to work. On my walk, I figured that thing out. Time to make it happen.
5:30 pm - Try to wrap the work day. Take a few minutes to plan for tomorrow.
5:30-9:30 pm - WHATEVER THE HELL I WANT.
Notice how my day is organized based on what I have to do first? For me, going to the gym is non-negotiable. I won't go into the countless benefits of exercising first thing in the day, but it's worth the slight discomfort of getting up early.
This is just like paying bills. You should pay the most important ones first. If you're eight months behind on your mortgage, paying the electric bill seems kinda stupid.
For this to work, you must limit some of these time blocks and be fully present when you're in them.
When you're at work, don't mess around. Get the damn work done. Additionally, you must limit your daily time expenditure, and there's a good reason for this.
Parkinson's Law states that work will expand to fit the time you give it, so by knowing that this is all the time you're going to give yourself, you'll likely get the same amount of work done as some workaholic corporate hero that just accepts a 12-hour day.
Because of thinking like this, I get a magical 4-hour block of WHATEVER THE HELL I WANT. It may not sound like much, but that's 1,040 hours a year on just weekdays alone.
That's dinner with my family. Going on a date with my wife. Watching my kid play football or do gymnastics. Playing some music. Writing another article. Time with friends. Learning something new. Fixing that damn thing in my house.
Infinite possibilities because that 4 hours is mine.
If I get up at the same time on the weekends, I'll have even more time to tackle some big projects.
That's it.
There are no quick hacks here.
You suck at estimating money, so you need to budget.
You suck at estimating food, so you need to track it.
You suck at estimating time, so you must limit and prioritize it.
This is the real, honest, simple answer to how I and so many others get our shit done: ruthless prioritization and self-awareness – because we all suck 👍.