Regain Control of Your Time in Minutes, Not Hours

If you clicked on this video, you're probably sick of feeling like work runs your life. You end your day exhausted, knowing you worked hard, but not entirely sure what you actually accomplished. You must be getting work done, but your to-do list isn't getting any smaller. Do not worry, my friends. You're not lazy and you're not bad at your job. The problem is that without clear practices for managing your time, work will expand to fill every available hour, I juggle my 9-to-5 with YouTube every single day while trying to have some semblance of a personal life, and I'm not going to lie, I often felt like I was drowning, until I stopped trying to do more and started doing things differently. In this video, I'm going to walk you through five practical planning techniques that help you reclaim control over your workday and maybe even enjoy it. Let's start with technique number one, which is to time track to diagnose the problem. So before you can get your time back, you need to know where it is actually going. I know, time tracking sounds tedious, but I genuinely swear by it. Time tracking involves every single day sitting down and recording what you did. You're not trying to lie to yourself or anybody else, you're just scribbling down what you did and when you did it. I first started doing this as a semi-regular practice after I read Laura Vanderkam's book Off the Clock. She did this first for herself and then also did research with other people and found that people who feel less busy aren't actually less busy, they're just more intentional about how they use their time. And she didn't figure out how to be more intentional with her time until she tried time tracking, and neither will you, okay? So time tracking is going to do a major thing for you. It's going to give you the truth. I guarantee right now you have misconceptions about where your time is going. You probably think you're not getting enough sleep or working too much on a certain project, but time tracking tells it like it is and you're going to soon learn how you actually spend your time. Then, and only then, can you make those intentional decisions. For example, not in this spread but in a different spread, I once tracked my time for two weeks and I discovered that I was spending 16.25 hours on social media and internet browsing, which is basically a part-time job's worth of scrolling. But here's what shocked me even more when I did that time tracking experiment. That was almost exactly the same amount of time I was spending on YouTube during the week. So I could have had a second YouTube channel if I just stopped mindlessly browsing Instagram. That was several years ago and so now I've gotten most of my social media under control and now I time track in my Hobonichi Cousin. And my asks of myself when I time track are a little bit more specific. I'm looking to figure out how much I'm sleeping, how much time I'm spending on YouTube, and how many hours of meetings I'm in per day. And this literally takes seconds for me to do. I just flip back to my weekly and I draw a little line, write a little thing about what I've been doing for the past hour or several hours, and then move on. I like to do it throughout the day but Laura Vanderkam actually did it at the end of every single day. She broke down her time into half-hour increments, wrote what she was doing during those half hours just by memory. So either thing works if you come in here at the end of the day and you remember loosely what you did versus if you come in here every hour. It just depends on what works for you. But here is your next step, okay? Track at least one full week. No judgment, just data. You can use your phone's calendar, a paper planner, a google sheet, whatever you want to do. And you're just trying to see the truth about where your time currently goes. And then analyze the data, see what you find. If you've done this before, go ahead and leave in the comments what the craziest thing you realized about yourself was when you time tracked. I'm always fascinated by what people realize during this process and I would be really curious to see what you come to know about yourself. Okay, let's talk about technique number two. You want to simplify your planning system. This is a paradox that we all get into, okay? Planning systems should save time but complex systems can steal the time they are meant to protect. Every unique element you add to your planning system, different trackers, apps that don't sync, elaborate layouts, all of this consumes mental and physical energy. So if you have multiple apps, multiple habit trackers, multiple decorated spreads that you feel you're obligated to, you're gonna have to start picking and choosing. I actually just made a video on my minimum viable planning method which is really going to help you determine what your bare minimum planner is. I will leave it linked up in the cards but as a little sneak preview, this is sort of what it looks like. You're trying to fill out the statement, if I use my tools and stay up to date with my habit, my system will feel like some sort of like result, right? So go check out that video if you want to know more about how to do this. But another really easy way to do this, especially if you feel like your systems are too complex to minimize all the way down, is to create a bunch of templates, essentially. I have a template for everything I do repeatedly, email responses, meeting agenda templates, a weekly review checklist like you can see right here, and you just want to start making these and slotting them in where they make sense. So this is a bookmark that goes in my weekly spread or, for example, I also have like a key for the health tracking that I do right in the monthly spread where I'm tracking this information and then this goes with me to future months when I inevitably get to like April of next year or whatever. This will then be paper clipped to that page. Start building out those kinds of templates and keys and most importantly putting them exactly where you need them, not just like clipping them to the front of your planner and then completely forgetting that they are there. I'm talking about putting them in the spread that you will actually use them. Every time you make a decision from scratch you are spending more and more mental energy, but templates give you back that energy for the work that actually matters. Next week I'm going to be coming out with a whole video on creating these mini command centers in your planner so that you never have to remember all the different things you have to do on a regular basis. So if it's up it'll be up in the cards or you can go search my channel for it, but for now your next step is to identify one planning task you do repeatedly and create a template for it. So it could be your weekly review like I have here, your meeting prep, your end of day routine, a monthly routine, and then pin this to the appropriate layout where you will actually reference it. So remember my tracker, my monthly key, is in my monthly spread. This goes in my weekly spread, right? Then see if it helps you regain any of that important brain power that you are doing just trying to maintain your system. Hopefully this helps you put it on autopilot. Technique number three is to do less stuff, aka prioritize and delegate. So this is the one that everybody resists. I feel like I resisted it for a long time, but essentially it's the most powerful. You want to do less stuff, right? You're probably overwhelmed because you're just doing too much. Like we only have certain amount of hours in the day and then on top of that we have to like feed ourselves, maybe feed a family, go for a walk, make sure we're not sedentary, give our eyes a break from our screen, do something fun. Like there's all these requirements to just being a person that sometimes the priorities we give ourselves for our work life or our business or whatever, they can kind of feel like they encroach on that space significantly. So I want you to go through these prioritization questions that I have here. Also speaking of templates, this is like literally a template. This sticky note is something that I have floating around in my planner so that I can every time, you know, something gets thrown on my desk, I can ask myself these questions and they're really helpful. So here's how this goes. The first question you want to ask is, does this need to be done? Then the second question you want to ask is, does this need to be done now? And the third question you want to ask is, does this need to be done by me? Does this need to be done is the first question you want to ask because some things on your to-do lists are wants, not needs, or are something somebody else wants, but that doesn't actually fit into your priorities that you shouldn't really have to deal with. So those nice-to-have things, those things that take away time from your bandwidth that you're kind of annoyed that you have to do, those are not must-dos and they will be filtered out by this question. Now when you ask yourself, does this need to be done now? You're essentially asking yourself, like, how time-sensitive is it? When you're planning, you should always be working backward from deadlines, especially multi-step projects, right? What's the deadline? When do I need to be halfway through it? What's the milestone? All those kinds of things. But in the moment, you're going to have to assess the urgency of whatever is just coming across your desk on any given day. You want to make this decision fast, communicate it clearly to the people who need to know, and then move on. So if something comes across your desk and you're like, I don't really have time for that, that's not really a priority right now, it'd be nice to get to later, it just doesn't need to happen right now, let the people who asked you to do it know. Say, hey, like, this is going to take time away from my other priorities. If it's your boss, you can say, do you want me to focus on this new thing or get done the other things you assigned me on time? That's a really powerful way to talk to your boss, actually. Or if it's something else from someone who maybe doesn't have a position of power over you, you can assess, does this need to be done now? And if the answer is no, just put it on ice. If your partner asks you to redesign the living room or redecorate the living room, but you're in the middle of a super busy time at work, does it need to be done now? You can let them know, I would love to do this, but I can't really get up to it right now and it just needs to wait until next month. Trust your gut on that one, because you're going to have to move fast. This is where people get bogged down. And then does this need to be done by me? Consider designated responsibilities here. So is this literally your job? There are things only I can or should do as a manager of my department, right? Those are the things that must be done by me. So I make sure to do those things and I try really hard to delegate the rest. And here's the truth about delegation. It is not just for managers. You can delegate household tasks to partners based on their strengths. Like, for example, in my household, I do all of the laundry and my partner does all of the dishes. And it's because I hate doing dishes and he hates doing laundry. So it just works out for both of us. And if I need something washed, I delegate it to him. And I'm like, hey, can you please wash this? Of course, at work, if you have direct reports or other people in your department, whose actual job it is to do the task that is coming across your desk for some reason, you want to reroute those things to their appropriate place. And of course, I always say it, if you don't have the time to do the things you need to do or the skill to do the things you need to do, you can always outsource. For instance, as many of you know, I recently started a newsletter where I'm sharing planning techniques, productivity, deep dives, all sorts of cool stuff. There's a link in the description if you want to check it out. But I wanted this newsletter to look as professional as the content I was putting into it. So I needed a logo, I needed a color palette, custom made assets. Really, I needed a brand package because I've been doing YouTube for so long that I just haven't gotten my branding in order. But I don't have the time or expertise to create that kind of stuff myself. So I went to Fiverr, who are kindly sponsoring today's video. Fiverr is a freelance marketplace with experts ranging from marketing and e-commerce management to web design, SEO, SEM, whatever you need, Fiverr has got it. And what really stood out to me about Fiverr specifically is how easy they make it to find the right person. You can filter by budget, delivery time, seller level, and every freelancer has detailed ratings, reviews, portfolios, all this stuff you can actually browse. So you're not guessing. You can see exactly what other clients experienced, even review some of that work, see what you like. Personally, I found this freelancer named Mattia, who seemed perfect for what I needed. He was super professional from the jump. And within 48 hours, he was back with follow up questions and a first draft after I sent him my initial request. We went back and forth a little bit. And within four or five days total, I had a completely finished logo, a style guide, brand assets, fonts, the whole thing. I was amazed at how easy it was to build my own team of freelancers for projects like this. And I would totally go back to Fiverr and do other stuff now that I have those branding assets. Like I could even hire like a person to design my website or a person to design like a fancier newsletter template if I wanted. So you can see how you can really create your own little team. I've already started to incorporate some of these elements around both the YouTube channel and the newsletter. And it's amazing what a difference design work like this makes. I never would have been able to do this without professional help. And Fiverr offers professionalism at the push of a button. So if you want or need to delegate tasks like this and you want to use Fiverr, go ahead and use the code RACHEL10 for 10% off of your first order on Fiverr. Link is in the description. Thanks again to Fiverr for sponsoring. Really, really recommend that you try to delegate some stuff that you don't have the expertise for but needs to get done. All right, let's talk about technique number four, setting boundaries and gathering evidence. So you have identified your priorities using the prioritization questions, but what happens when your boss keeps interrupting with urgent requests or when meetings eat up all your focused work time? This is where the distraction method comes in. So the distraction method is something that I came up with several years ago because I was facing this exact thing. I kept getting pulled into different projects when I had priorities. And so in the distraction method, you track interruptions right in your work planner's monthly or weekly spread. So when something pulls you away from your stated priorities, just note it down. I color-coded everything so you can see in this one what I ended up doing because I do work a traditional nine-to-five is I took over the weekends and wrote my priorities that were handed down to me from my boss. I wrote those in the weekend slot and then during the week I wrote down the main thing that distracted me from my priorities. All this stuff in green is stuff that distracted me that was other work tasks that distracted me, and then everything in blue is essentially like something that distracted me that really shouldn't have distracted me is really like my problem. So not only was I able to see like, oh social media was a big problem for me this month, but also I had a lot of email campaigns come up that I didn't expect. We had a few releases and reports that needed to be highlighted that I didn't expect. And all of this took away from my priorities. So obviously ideally I won't be on social media and now I know that I can see that. But these distractions, these work level distractions, are really where this makes a difference. And this is because this is data. It's not complaints. It's evidence for those conversations with your boss when they're like, hey why didn't this priority get done? Why didn't that priority get done? Once you track this for a week or a couple of weeks you can go back to them and you can say, I didn't complete the website redesign because newsletters came up on Monday and Friday and each took three to four hours. Can we either build in the newsletter time or delegate that task so I can still focus on the redesign? That way the framing that you have with people is collaborative. So here's what came up, how can we handle these interruptions going forward? You're problem solving with your boss or colleagues. You're not confronting them. You're just saying, hey I kept track of what distracted me. This is what I was seeing. How do we work with this going forward? Now I suggest doing this in something like a monthly spread. Essentially a spread with a small amount of space is going to help keep you focused. This helps you only note significant distractions, so the multi-hour disruptions, not every like five minute conversation. This is going to keep the data meaningful, keep the conversation focused, and keep you from losing your mind. You can come in here at the end of the day and just be like, oh man those emails really got me distracted, like email campaigns really got me distracted, or all that event setup that I had to do in the afternoon really kept me from my priorities. Compare that to something like a vertical weekly planning spread where every like half hour is plotted out. This is just a little bit much, so doing it in a smaller spread is really my best recommendation. So here's another piece of homework for you. For the next week, track what pulls you away from your stated priorities. Note what time was lost, what the interruption was, and then just schedule a 15-minute check-in with your boss. Discuss those patterns and brainstorm solutions together. It makes you look professional, it makes you look on top of your ----, and I promise your boss is going to be more happy about you communicating the issues with them than they are about you just skipping your priorities with no information to back up as to why. Technique five is to time block according to your energy folks. I feel like time blocking sounds really scary when you say it, a lot like time tracking actually. People really don't like to look at their time, they don't like to look at it head-on. Time blocking is really important, but most people get time blocking wrong because most people are treating all hours of the day as equal when they are time blocking, and this is why it's not successful for them because hours in the day are not equal to one another. Your brain at 9 a.m. is so different than your brain at 3 p.m. So once you get comfortable tracking your time, remember this spread? Once you get comfortable tracking your time like this, you can go back and start adding more information on top of that. So what was your energy like in the morning? Do you notice from your time tracking that you are experiencing sluggishness in the afternoon? You're like more likely to get distracted in the afternoon. Just start to note that as you go through your time tracking or after you're done with your time tracking because then that's going to be evidence for how you should time block in the future. A lot of my feelings on this come from Daniel Book's, Daniel Book? Daniel Pink's book When, which is about the science of like time and energy, and what he found during his research was that in the morning most of us have this peak a couple hours after we wake up, right? We're able to do the most analytical tasks, we're the most alert, we're the most focused, then in the afternoon we fall into what is considered our trough where we are sluggish, tired, easily distractible, all that kind of stuff, and then we get this sort of like second wind recovery period in the evening where we feel really creative, really free form, maybe not so analytical but definitely not as like sad and lazy as we feel in the afternoon. So if you notice during your time tracking that this is the general flow of feeling that you have, that's really good to know because then you can plan your peak stuff, your most analytical stuff for earlier in the day, then there's a trough, then there's the recovery, and you can sort of plan in your tasks accordingly. Now some of you may notice that you are in fact a night owl. When you wake up you don't feel like peak analytical, you actually feel like more like recovery-esque, more creative, more free form, and that's okay. You might wake up late, have that recovery period, and that's okay. For you this time tracking is reversed, right? You want to wake up, have this more free form, recovery, creative period, then you'll have your break, and then you will still have your trough in the afternoon, you know, eat a little dinner, come back, and you're at your peak hours right before you go to bed. This is why time tracking is so important because everybody's a little bit different. For most of us it will look like this, but if it looks like this for you, now you know how to break up your time. So here's what that looks like in a little bit more detail, right? Priorities up here at the top in your peak hours, that might be any writing you have to do, analytical tasks, anything that requires willpower or energy, then in the afternoon you want to do things that are not urgent, you want to do things that are admin tasks, so emails and correspondence, consuming content, I would say like for me like if I have to watch anything to review those things, it's really easy for me to do in the afternoon when I'm a little bit tired. Meetings, this is a personal one, for some of you meetings may be like top priority stuff, you have to have a lot of willpower. For me, meetings in the afternoon are good because I can actually just like talk my way through some stuff when I'm feeling tired, I don't have to be at like peak analytical processing power, so for me I put meetings in the afternoon. You may want, you know, email correspondence in the morning. Sometimes if I have emails that I find really hard to send, I have to put them at up top. And then in the evening, you have this creative free-form feeling, good for art projects, explorative research, walking, doing something with your body, low pressure admin or priority setup, like sometimes I will use this block of time to just set up my next day because that's a way for me to feel like relaxed. So it just depends on what for you are high energy tasks, high willpower tasks, low energy tasks that can be done basically on autopilot, and more creative, more free-form tasks that you can do in this relaxing period before you go to sleep. So here is your next step folks, I want you to look at your time tracking data, identify where you have the most energy, and the next week schedule your top priorities for those hours in which you find yourself having the most energy. Put routine tasks in your natural slump and see how you feel to really define whether or not you need breaks or when you can push yourself a little further. Here's the bottom line, work will take as much of your time as you let it, but when you time track to see where your hours actually go, simplify your planning to reduce friction, ruthlessly prioritize what actually matters, set boundaries backed by evidence, and time block according to your energy, you shift from reactive to proactive. You don't have to implement all five techniques tomorrow, pick one, maybe start with time tracking for a week or identify your top three priorities for tomorrow. One of my biggest priorities these days is reminding y'all that I have launched a newsletter, check it out at the link below or by scanning the QR code on the screen. It is a great read for when you should be clearing out your inbox, and if you want to dive deeper into creating your own productivity system, I've got a whole video on that right here on the screen next to my head. As always, thank you so much for watching, for being subscribed, for being awesome, I love you so much, and I will see you in the next one. Bye!