How to make time for everything

If you constantly feel like there isn't enough time to work, exercise, see your friends, have hobbies, take care of yourself, and have a life, you probably don't need more hours in a day. What you need is to stop trying to fit everything into every single day. Because having time for everything doesn't mean you have to do everything daily, it means creating a system where everything important to you gets attention often enough that no part of your life continuously gets pushed aside. So if you want to make time for everything, here are some things that you need to do. First thing is to plan your life by week, not by day. Because most people are going to look at a day and think, okay I need to work, I need to exercise, I need to study, I need to clean, I should probably see my friends, I need to work on my hobbies, all of that stuff. And suddenly, you're cramming everything into one day. So of course it's going to seem as if you don't have enough time, but when you can zoom out and understand that there are 168 hours in a week, you actually have a lot more time than you think. Not everything needs to happen every single day to be consistent in your life. So maybe your weeks could look more like, okay I'm going to go to the gym four times per week, I'm going to work on this personal project two times per week, and I'm going to see my friends at least once a week. You're still exercising, you're socializing, you're learning, you're resting, all of that, but you're able to handle all of those responsibilities in a manner that's distributed across those seven days rather than cramming it all into one. Or thinking you have to cram it all into one. There's a concept in psychology called implementation intentions, and it helps explain why giving activities a specific place can be helpful. Because research has found that connecting an intended behavior to a specific future situation, especially where you'll do it, can make following through more reliable. So when you're able to plan things in a manner where every day has a specific thing, and everything is intentional, then that can allow for a more balanced life. Second thing is to give every day one main thing outside of just working. Instead of asking how much time can I possibly fit in after work or before work, you can say what's the main thing that I want to get accomplished during this period of time, and maybe in that day it's going to the gym, or maybe it's going to work on a personal project or something like that. And there's actually research explaining why this can be more efficient. So there's this phenomenon called attention residue. When you switch away from an unfinished task, your attention can remain stuck on what you were just doing, making it harder to fully engage with what comes next. And separate experiments on task switching have found measurable switching costs when people repeatedly alternate between tasks. Your brain isn't going to instantly switch between the different roles that you identify yourself with in a manner where there's zero transition cost. And doing fewer categories of things to do per day can allow you to have more categories of things that you're able to do in your life. Third thing is to decide how often something actually needs to happen. People often create impossible schedules, but when you ask yourself, does this actually need to happen every day, then you'll come to realize that it probably doesn't. Because consistency is not the same as daily repetition. You can still be consistent without doing it every single day. Next thing is to create a minimum version of everything, because every day can look a little different, and sometimes, some days aren't necessarily going to be as easy to implement things. It's important to have a habit that has two versions. You can have the regular version, when things are going well, and then the busy version, for when things aren't so great, or things are busy, or anything of the sort. For example, let's just say your ideal workout is 60 minutes. If you're busy, if you're not having a great day, whatever it may be, that version could be 20 minutes, but you're still at least getting something done. And there's actually some useful behavioral science behind this. Real world research has found that repeatedly performing a behavior can make that behavior become easier to initiate without having as much deliberate effort. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean, with our example, that a 20 minute workout is going to be superior to a 60 minute workout, but if making a behavior smaller allows you to keep repeating it when life gets busier, when life gets tough, then you don't have to abandon that behavior entirely. So you're designing a habit that can compress rather than disappear. Next thing is to separate growth mode from maintenance mode, since not everything needs to be improving at the maximum speed simultaneously. Imagine you're studying for an important exam for your career, and you're spending several hours a week on it. That may be growth mode, but fitness may temporarily be in maintenance mode. So you're still going to exercise, but maybe instead of five workouts, maybe it's three. And this matters because cognitive effort itself carries a cost. One influential neuroscience theory called the expected value of control model proposes that the brain weighs things like expected payoffs, how much cognitive control is needed, and how costly that effort will be when determining how much control to allocate. In extremely simplified terms, it essentially means that your brain is constantly asking how much effort does this require, and what am I getting from it, and trying to decide what to do as a result. What this means for you is that intensive cognitive control is not free, so trying to put five major goals into this growth mode simultaneously is going to have very different demand than choosing one or two things while maintaining the others. You can have a lot of goals, they just don't need to be accelerating at the same time, because it makes things a lot more difficult to make time for those things. Next thing is to batch little things together, because another massive drain is letting tiny responsibilities interrupt your entire week. So whether it be making an appointment, or ordering something, or answering an email, or returning something, or paying for something, picking up something, laundry, whatever it is, those random errands, instead of doing them throughout the week, if you can have a day where you just get it all done, that can protect your time from being drained. And research on dual task interference has shown that relatively simple tasks can interfere with one another when you're trying to process them at the same time. Instead of interrupting studying to answer an email, or your workout to order something, or your evening to make an appointment or something like that, try to have a day where you can collect those tasks and handle them all together. Another thing is to combine compatible activities, not competing ones. In order to create more time without literally creating more hours, what you can do is allow parts of your life to overlap. Let's say for example, if you're walking, you can call your friend, or when you're commuting you can listen to a podcast, or when you're working out you can listen to an audiobook or something of the sort. And the important part of this is compatibility. Because research has shown that trying to perform two tasks that both require substantial cognitive processing can hurt performance. So if you're studying, but you're also writing an email, that probably isn't going to be a great combination. But if you're walking while you're listening to an audiobook, that doesn't place the exact same amount on your attention. So the goal isn't to multitask everything, it's to figure out what things naturally coexist so that way you don't have to do them at completely separate hours of your life. Another thing, and this might be a little uncomfortable because you're going to have to ask when you say that you don't have time for something, do you actually not have time for it? Or is there something else occupying the time where that thing should go? Because time doesn't appear out of nowhere, it typically gets reallocated. So let's just say you want to read for 30 minutes. Or maybe you want to learn a new language. You only have a select amount of opportunities to allocate your time and attention. So instead of thinking, how do I also do this on top of everything else? Think, what deserves this time more? And what matters most to you? And then from there, make those tradeoffs deliberately. So that way you can accomplish what you'd like. Next thing, have something to look forward to. Making time for everything doesn't necessarily mean that you need to create a perfectly efficient but incredibly boring life. In fact, it's not sustainable because after a while you'll probably get bored and lose motivation and get discouraged and then from there you're not going to want to continue. So, have something that you're genuinely excited about. Maybe it's dinner somewhere new. Maybe it's a hobby. Maybe it's a day trip. Maybe it's going to meet a friend. Anything like that. You want to have something that you're going to look forward to. Because interestingly enough, anticipation itself is part of the brain's reward system. Brain imaging research has found that anticipating an upcoming reward activates regions involved in reward anticipation and motivation including the nucleus accumbens. But the point is, the reward isn't just about experiencing something enjoyable. It's also about having that anticipation for that enjoyable thing. So don't make your calendar exclusively working and chores and the gym and sleep and all of that. Give your future self something to look forward to as well. Next thing, and this is arguably one of the things that I consider most important, but leave buffer time because you're probably underestimating things. This one has pretty fascinating psychology behind it, but people have a tendency known as planning fallacy. And basically what happens is we're overly optimistic about how quickly we're going to And that's even when previous experiences tell us otherwise. Until you try to actually follow through with that plan and you realize that you needed a lot more time than you planned. And doing so doesn't necessarily mean that you're a failure at time management. It just means that your schedule had no tolerance for reality. And there are going to be moments where things get delayed or things take a little bit more time. When you're able to intentionally leave space instead of assigning every minute to a specific task. That buffer time is going to prevent one delay from destroying the rest of your schedule. And last thing for now is stop asking, do I have time and start asking, is this worth my time? This might be one of the biggest mindset shifts, but you have a limited amount of time, attention, and cognitive effort. When you have two hours after work, don't immediately ask yourself, how many things can I accomplish? Instead, ask yourself, what would make these two hours the most valuable? Maybe it's studying, maybe it's working out, maybe it's working on your business or anything of the sort. But the thing is, every hour is an allocation decision, and you don't need to use every hour productively. You just need to use enough hours intentionally to get the results that you desire. So yeah, having time for everything doesn't necessarily mean that you need to pack your schedule to the brim and work yourself to exhaustion, but what it does mean is that you can make time for everything by giving everything a proper place and being intentional with your time management, as well as realistic. So with that, hopefully you will be able to make time for everything. Hope that helps. Bye!