3 Simple Tricks to Reclaim Your Time

Time is the one resource you can never get back. Modern society pushes us to always do more, always say yes, and always be available. The result is too much to do but too little time for it all. This leads to anxiety and frustration.

But there is hope. Research in psychology and management has uncovered some surprising facts that might help you to reclaim your time. This post is about how to use them right away.

First Trick: The Pareto Principle

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, says that 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. This is just a rough rule of thumb, but it holds (approximately) surprisingly often. In practice, it means that most of the sales in a shop come from a few products, most views in a YouTube channel or blog come from a few posts, most computer crashes come from a few code bugs, and so on.

It also means that you might be wasting a large portion of your time.

Think of what you want to get out of your time. For your working hours, it might be revenue, opportunities for career advancement, or number of customers served. It might be something very specific, like number of views for posts and videos for a content creator, or something more fuzzy, like job satisfaction. For your leisure time, it might be opportunities for learning and personal growth, family happiness, or simply personal enjoyment.

Suppose you made a list of all the things you have to do. For work, this might be a list of tasks, projects you are involved in, or customer or product accounts. For leisure, it might be a list of planned activities, hobbies, or shared experiences. Whatever they are, would you expect all of them to give exactly the same results? The same revenues, sales, enjoyment, or satisfaction?

Of course not. Some of your projects will lead to more sales or views than others. Some of your private activities will be more rewarding than others. What the Pareto Principle says is that the difference is larger than you might think.

You can reclaim your time by concentrating on the most effective tasks or activities. If you can, drop projects and even customers at work to concentrate on the most productive ones (this might need a discussion with your supervisor). If you have a blog, or a YouTube account, concentrate on the topics that bring you the most views. For your leisure, drop the activities that bring you the least joy.

You will find that you are giving up just a small part of the results (revenues, views, enjoyment) in exchange for a large amount of reclaimed time. Remember: sometimes, winners do quit.

Read more about the Pareto Principle in the second post in this series.

Second Trick: Stop Multitasking

Checking emails while attending an online meeting? Listening to a podcast while updating a spreadsheet? Calling a friend while rearranging your desk? Multitaskers believe that they are more productive—but, in fact, they are not. Research in psychology shows that we cannot perform more than one cognitive task at once. What our brain actually does, often without us being conscious of it, is switch back and forth between tasks. This is why the term used in research is not multitasking but task-switching.

For any task requiring thinking or attention, our minds have a single track. It is called the mind’s bottleneck. If you try to do several things at once, your mind switches back and forth. You never achieve full concentration, you waste time refocusing on each task, and you make more mistakes without noticing them (and you increase your cognitive load). Multitaskers take longer to complete their tasks and make more mistakes while doing so, which forces them to spend time fixing problems later on.

This trick is really simple: stop multitasking. Whenever you are tempted to do several things at once, don’t. Instead, prioritize. Do the important things first (remember the 80/20 rule?), and give them your full attention.

If you can, consider time-blocking, a time management method whereby you divide your working day into thematic blocks of time. For example, a researcher or analyst might answer emails for half an hour at the beginning and end of her day, work on data analysis in the morning, and concentrate on writing in the afternoon. There is a lot of talk in management about deep work, which is even more extreme: Put aside entire days to focus on specific tasks and projects, minimizing distractions and interruptions.

Read more about the power of single-tasking in the third post in this series.

Third Trick: Remember the Opportunity Costs

Modern life puts pressure on you to take on more tasks. Nobody wants to be the naysayer, and it can feel rude to say no. However, your time is limited. You cannot do everything. When your time runs out, you will not be able to do more.

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That means that every yes is also a no. Every time you agree to a new task, you say no to other opportunities. Or you take time away from projects, tasks, and activities that you have already taken on. In the worst-case scenario, you start using your personal time to cope with all your work tasks.

When you accept a new task or take up a new activity, the opportunity cost is the loss of possible benefits from other alternatives because you will not be able to pursue them anymore. The problem is that the new task is in front of you right now, while alternatives are still in the air. That makes the opportunity cost difficult to grasp, but it is real. So you say yes, and your time goes away.

One way to avoid such a trap is to delay your decisions: “I am not sure I have the bandwidth. Let me check and get back to you.” Collect requests for a short while, and choose which ones to accept, if any (again, remember the 80/20 rule!). This is, of course, hard to do if the request comes from your boss, but once you start doing this, you might be surprised to discover how many tasks you are taking on voluntarily when you should not.