I know you never have enough time but, what would you do with an extra 40 hours a month? Seriously, if you had more time, what would you do with it? Sleep, exercise, write a book, study, spend quality time with those you love? You have a budget for your money (I hope), but do you ever think of doing a budget for your time?

So, I did a little time budget/allocation exercise and here’s how I came up with an extra 40 hours (41 to be exact), and I may have been a bit conservative):

  • Sign up to an online grocery delivery app like Checkers Sixty 60
    • Stop doing last minute dashes to the shops to get things you have forgotten. It’s a waste of your time, energy and fuel.
    • Save at least 2 hours a week = 8 hours a month
  • Uber to get things from A to B instead of getting in the car yourself
    • Time is money.
    • Don’t sit in the traffic delivering things yourself.
    • Save 1 hour a week = 4 hours a month
  • Set up digital wallets utilising your watch or your smartphone
    • Saves a few minutes per transaction in searching for your purse/wallet ,etc.
    • Say that’s 15 minutes a week = 1 hour a month
  • Watch 1 hour instead of 2 hours of TV a night
    • Save 7 hours a week = 28 hours a month
    • If you watch three hours a day, cut down to 1 and you’ve just freed up 56 hours a montt
  • TOTAL
    • 41 hours a month
    • 10 hours a week
    • That’s almost a whole work day extra a week!
    • What can you do with that?

Do this: A time audit

I encourage you to do this exercise with an open mind and no judgement. The idea is to try to disrupt the way you have been doing things from a time perspective. 

  • Is the way you are using your time serving you?
  • Are there areas where you can save time?
  • Can you re-distribute and utilise your time in a different way?
  • What would you do with an extra 40 hours a month?

Note to self: you don’t have to keep doing things the way you have always done them, especially if they are not serving you at work or at home.

Exercise

Divide a landscape blank piece of paper into six columns with these headings:
  1. Activity
    • How many minutes or hours do you dedicate to this activity?
  2. Must it be done by you?
    • Tick this column if the answer is yes
  3. Can you reduce the time you spend on this?
    • Eg. Instead of watching two hours of TV a night, watch one, freeing up a whole seven hours a week!
    • What could you do with seven hours a week?
  4. Who else could do it?
    • Can you delegate or sub-contract this?
  5. What AI or technology could you use?
    • To do it for you?
    • To do it quicker or more efficiently?
Click here to download the template. See where you are spending your time and what you can change.

What would you do with an extra 40 hours a month? Align your time with your priorities

Investing time in unimportant areas will not get you closer to where you want to go or need to be. Write these sayings on Post It notes and stick them where you will see them every day to remind you that:
  • Money goes where energy flows
  • What you focus on will flourish
Aligning priorities is just as important at work as it is at home. Get your team in on the exercise and see if they can find different ways to distribute time so that you keep the main thing the main thing. It’s amazing how quickly teams can get side-tracked and lose their focus. 
I help leaders and their teams to get focused on what success looks like, then we get granular when it comes to priorities and alignment. Talk to me about what assistance you think you need in order to keep fulfilling your promise, as a leader and a team, to add value to the business. If you don’t shift your bottom line in the right direction, you may not stay in business.

Kickstart 2024 strong: The Series with Nikki Bush on Radio 702

You can listen to the four-part series with Relebogile Mabotja on 702 below:

Nikki Bush
Human Potential Expert