7 Simple Habits That Save Me 20+ Hours a Week

Do you know the number one thing that will determine how much you get done in your life? It's not time management. It's energy management. So your life is about energy. And if you can orient your life around how much energy you have and how you expend the energy and what you even expend it on, that is going to dictate how much you end up ultimately getting done. So in this video, I thought I would share seven rituals that I do that really save me at least 20 hours per week. So let's jump in. Hey guys, it's Alex Hine. Before we jump in, I put together a free seven-day self-growth challenge. It's the first link right below this video. So check that out. It's going to have some useful daily little emails that will help you figure out how to get 1% better. Ritual number one is the Ivy Lee method. Now the Ivy Lee method comes from one of my favorite personal development books by Earl Nightingale, Lead the Field. He talks about how this consultant was consulting one of the largest steel manufacturers in America. And that consultant had actually given him a piece of advice that was the most valuable advice he had ever gotten that year in terms of how much he ended up getting done. Now the Ivy Lee method is simple. You take out a piece of paper, you list basically what are the five things that you need to get done that will make the biggest difference, in this case, in his workday. You label them from one to five. And then basically you work from most important and most difficult to the least. And if you cannot get that list done after you've tried it for a few days, you begin removing items. So let's say after three days you remove it down to four. And then if you can't even do four, you remove it to three. But the gist is simple. You figure out the five most important things that will generate the outcome that you want. You start from the hardest to the easiest. And once you finish that first one, you cross it off. Or in this case, I like to shade these boxes, something that I invented because I like the visual feeling of getting things done. So I use this whether it's my number one work goal or whether it's I want to go out more and I want to meet more people. And so today I'm going to plan one social event per weekend. It's also what I use to do well in my medical program while also still building this channel. The second ritual that has made a giant difference in my life is finding the right who and trying to hire out little menial tasks in my life. Someone gave me a brilliant piece of advice. He's a business person. And he said, instead of trying to figure out how to do that thing, find the right who. So let's say you've moved into your new apartment and there's a lot of beautiful sunlight which you love. But you know what that means? It means you're going to need to put up some curtains. Now you need to measure the windows, measure the curtains, measure that curtain rod, hang it up, and maybe you need to put it on four or five windows. Now that might take you, let's say, an hour or two. And if you don't even have a tape measure, maybe three hours because now you've got to go drive out and go get one. But instead of you trying to figure out what to do, like how do I hang these up? What do I get? What color do I get? Go on TaskRabbit, which is an app for finding little local gigs. Hire someone, pay them the 50 or 80 bucks for two hours of their time, and have them do all of that. And voila, you can see that when you multiply this one task by five or six or ten things, cleaning up your apartment, getting a house cleaner, miscellaneous installations, things are breaking down, this can add up to a lot of time you have saved, and for frankly not that much money. Now, the third hack that can save you 20 hours a week is putting projects or hobbies that you're working on into a 90-day framework and put them all in one Evernote file. You know, for example, one hobby that I picked up was bachata dancing. This was something that became an absolute passion of mine. It was something where I could meet people organically here in Los Angeles. It was something that was good for the spirit because it's literally dancing. And it's something that I've always wanted to do but was far too afraid to do. Now, the problem is that if you've ever tried dancing and you're a lead, basically you're the man, you have to lead the dance, which means you have to memorize hundreds of moves and try to actually do those in real time while you're listening to one, two, three, five, six, seven, one, two, three, five, six, seven. So you can imagine trying to repeat a memorized sequence on the exact moment that is properly timed while holding hands with a woman that is supposed to follow that is not easy. So what did I end up doing to actually save myself some time? I started putting a master list in Evernote of all the bachata moves that I wanted to work on. Right? I was working on bachata and salsa and so I put down, you know, core bucket of bachata patterns and I pasted one and two and three. I even posted some videos of really well-known dancers that I liked so I could emulate some of their dance styles or some of their dance moves. And eventually what I would do was once a week I would go out social dancing and I would look at that Evernote file on my phone and just remind myself, okay, today is Monday, January 12th, I'm working on these three bachata moves, right? I'm working on the culito, I'm working on a certain kind of turn and I'm working on some other move. And rather than me having to go to Dropbox to look at my dance teacher's lessons that she would send us after class, instead with an Evernote I could put them in a sequential way to review my quarterly goal, which was developing a certain level of proficiency at this actual hobby. Habit four that will save you a lot of time is pay someone to clean your place. I know this is so unsexy and I know you might be thinking it costs a lot, but there are tons of people that you can pay $60 if you have a small apartment or you have a one bedroom that will clean your entire place in the course of a couple hours. Now for a lot of those people, they're undocumented and what they're doing is off the books. So frankly, even though it's illegal and they're not reporting it to the IRS, they're making a lot of money just cleaning four apartments for let's say $60 that day, right? $150 a day, let's say, and times five days. What is that? $1,250 times four. Do the math. That's potentially close to a six figure after tax income, depending on the state you live in, which is shocking to admit publicly. But my point is, think about all the time you spend cleaning. Unless you love it. Unless you love cleaning your dishes after you've cooked. Unless you love scrubbing your stove and your countertops. Unless you love mopping your floors. Unless you love cleaning your whole place every Sunday or maybe you just don't even clean your place. Pay someone $60 to get back hours of your Sunday and go out and do what you want to do with your life. Go play tennis. Go take a bachata class. Go get a long brunch with your friends or go hang out at the beach or wherever you want to go. But in general, buy back that time. I'm not talking about you need to be a doctor or a lawyer paying $800 for house cleaning. You can do it for less than $100 and you can even just do it once every few weeks. So even if you're an entry level person making $40,000, it's not going to break the bank and it's going to save a lot of time. And pro tip, I actually pay cleaners to do my laundry too. So a couple hours of cleaning, a couple hours of laundry, that's a whole day of putzing around that I could do whatever I want instead. Habit number five is to use a meal generator service. There's a really good online app that I use called Eat This Much. I'm not affiliated with it or associated with it. And what I love is that, you know, sometimes you go through phases of life where you really need to work on your health and nutrition. And it's clear that realistically, the only way to do this properly is to actually cook the food yourself, which kind of sucks. But the hardest part I find is that I've just worked 9 to 5, 9 to 6, 9 to 7, and then my number one thought is, well, what am I making? And that becomes a whole shtick because then I've got to Google something, some giallo that they say takes 30 minutes, but it really has 30 ingredients and it takes 30 minutes just to buy 30 ingredients. So what I use is this meal generator called Eat This Much. And I actually have it and I specify, you know, paleo or Mediterranean. And I have it generate the meal and I print off the shopping list from that. And it's not the only one. There are other paid services you can use. There are paleo meal generators. There are also just services you can pay $100 or a couple hundred a month for that will provide your actual meal plans every single day. Or you could hire a nutritionist or dietitian. The sixth ritual that can save you lots of time is finding whatever the top three rituals are that are more likely to help you reach the goal you're working on. So let's say your goal is you want to actually upload YouTube videos. What are the three things you have to do every single day if you want to make that happen? They could be, number one is you have to shoot every week. Number two is you have to, let's say, edit every week. And number three is you have to script or story tell every single week. Everything else is not important. Watching hours of YouTube videos, taking YouTube courses. The three most important things if you want to be a YouTuber are prepping content, shooting it and editing it. Now ultimately you don't have to do any of those things in the long run. But for the time being, those are your three core daily rituals. The reason people get lost in the complexity of their goals, whether the goal is writing a book or getting into law school or trying to find love or trying to be good at salsa dancing is that we aren't really clear on what are the few simple rituals that are most likely to actually make you good at that skill. And if you get clear on what are the things I have to do daily, you're going to eliminate 80 or 90% of the other stuff, which is noise. So really think, if my goal is to be good at YouTube, then there are three things I need to focus on, my storytelling or scripting, the video work and the editing. And you could reduce a nine or 10 hour workday that you were dedicating full time to just a couple hours by doing that singular thing. The seventh habit is to only work on three personal goals for the year. Again, this comes back to complexity people have. All of us have felt that feeling of maybe being in a phase of life like after college where you're not fit, you're out of shape. Maybe you've moved, so now you don't even have any friends. And let's just say you hate your job. So you have three big goals you want to work on, your health, building a new community and finding work you love that pays you well. But each of those is a large task, right? I mean, it can take going to several weekend events just trying to make new friends. It can take hours a day just trying to find a new apartment, let alone trying to find a new job. But one thing I found is that by having a personalized little goal board and goal sheet, I dedicate most of my year to only three major goals. And if it's a short term goal, like let's say building new friendships, then I dedicate 90 days. And so for 90 days, I'm going to work on just a few key habits to build new friendships. I'm going to reach out to one person I meet at a seminar or a workshop or a weekend event or a salsa class and invite them to hang out, right? And let's say for the other goal of finding a new career you love, you may feel like this is an imminent issue you have to work on, right? Because you get home from your crappy accounting job and you're like, I don't want to do this. And I sure as shit don't want to do this for the next 40 years. I need to figure this out, right? But if you've dedicated this quarter to just three goals, then you can say, you know what? When I get home, I'm just going to dedicate maybe 30 minutes to each goal. And then my work is done for the day. And so I'm going to go on Indeed or LinkedIn, or I'm going to send a DM to Alex through his YouTube channel, trying to find a job. And that's only feasible if you've limited your focus to just three major things with the one focusing question, what is going to make the biggest difference in my life this year? If these three things happen, what would those be? Use that as your focal point. So these are seven rituals and seven day-to-day habits that have made a big difference in saving time for me every single day, because a lot of what we do is we waste time in the complexity of life. And if you're clear on what you want and clear on a strategy to get there, you can really make a big, big, big difference and reach a lot of these personal life goals much faster by clearing away the noise. All right, guys, check out the free seven-day self-growth challenge right below this video and these other related videos right here.