How To Optimize Your Time

For a couple of years ago I came across Rory Waden’s time management analysis and corresponding lecture. I agreed with some parts, while being critical to other things. Mostly I realized that this lecture is somewhat incomplete and requires modifications and complementary pieces of advice.

Although the obsession of optimization may sometimes be misguided, occasionally it might be truly important to save time and efforts that you do not really need to spend and carry through.

Waden’s point is that we cannot really manage our time, only ourselves. Thus market rhetoric like to “multiply your time” is merely sales tactics and talking points. We have our 24 hours and there’s nothing you can do to change that.

However, we can indeed make adjustments in regard to our behavior and decision-making, hacks and principles that can be quite crucial whenever we have happen to have a big workload, family matters or other priorities that need to be taken care of. Perhaps it’s also particularly important to find ways to focus on our relationships, passions and hobbies to a larger extent, such as to write a novel and meet good friends.

1. Do things today that create more time tomorrow

This aspect may seem a bit paradoxical but on one hand you can take care of things today so that you don’t have to deal with them tomorrow. On the other hand you can give yourself “emotional permission” to procrastinate and don’t deal with them at all. Some things on your priority list may in fact not be that significant and you don’t have to deal with them at all. Their significance is low, hence of little value for your own life in the longer run.

This approach may be called selective procrastination. Waden underscores that procrastination in the true sense is negative, but not to selectively neglect things of little significance.

2. Automation

One of the major stress factors today is to deal with multiple trivial yet annoying and time-consuming micro tasks such as paying the bills, transfer money between accounts, and go out to consume things like food, clothes and furniture. But if you have your automatic payment services and subscriptions in check then you don’t have to deal with such matters to nearly the same extent.

Moreover, it might be wise to pay all of your major loans once or twice a year so you don’t have to deal with partial payments every month. For example I cannot escape my student loan, and therefore I pay the entire annual amount in January so I don’t have to deal with it for another 12 months.

Additionally you can make orders online and have them delivered to your home, like a new kitchen table from IKEA or a cool jacket.

3. Selective multitasking

I am a largely efficient and industrious person but not against the idea of reading articles and fixing private things at work whenever it may be appropriate. When you’re participating in another boring and likely unuseful meeting for one hour you can respond to important e-mails, browse the web for a trip, and make payments.

Furthermore, public transportation is an excellent place to read a bit and spend minimal time on social media and listen to catchy music, instead of making these trivial pastimes top priorities at home.

While multitasking may often be inefficient and create more stress, it exists situations where you can and perhaps should do it.

4. Let someone else do things for you

band maid

Friendly maids

I guess that many of you like to take care of miscellaneous tasks yourself and don’t need other people’s help. But there are things, both at work and in private, which you can delegate, even if you’re not your own boss. By showcasing agreeableness, benevolent manipulation, and some degree of social shrewdness it’s very much possible to make other people take care of things for you. Just be polite and do something in return from time to time.

At home, if you’re single, you should consider the idea of occasionally paying someone a reasonable sum to for example clean the entire place. At ROK guys tend to talk about going to the Philippines to have an easy lay, but what about the opposite: to let a poor Pina come to your house and fix things for you? After all, that would be more morally responsible than to impose work on your old mom who lives far away.

In summary

To be efficient and industrious is still important. Procrastination, if that implies to neglect significant tasks and responsibilities, is likewise negative. But there are approaches to manage yourself and consequently save time. If you make minor adjustments and have a proper approach to your own priority list, then you can end up being more relaxed, as well as less stressful and borderline neurotic.

Read More: 9 Easy Ways To Save A Ton Of Money

28 thoughts on “How To Optimize Your Time”

  1. Great article. During the week i have very little down time, so i will do little things to make the weekend a bit easier. Keeping the house clean is a big one.

    1. I’m retired, I have plenty of time to waste. No point on rushing from one thing to the next, who wants to live like that?

    2. Down time is earned time. You’ve crunched the clock and done everything. Now imagine if you’re bum rushed with tasks suddenly and you have to work hyperdrive using your head, mouth and all your limbs. If only you had more dexterity with your limbs so you could up your multitask capabilities.
      THIS LADY was born with no arms.

      Amazing. If a person with arms could train their legs in this fashion, they could do TWO office jobs simultaneously like a real life human octopus. Blind people too gain extra tactile abilities to read brail and can feel colors on paper. Normal people also can increase their tactile abilities like gynecologists or surgeons who work or feel blind with their fingers obscured from sight. Locksmiths can ‘read’ a lock with their fingers by feeling the workings of an unseen mechanism like a magician.
      With practice, there’s probably many more ways to upgrade your ability level with your own assorted bodily facets to become a more abled and super productive OCTOPUS MAN.

  2. The paradox is the more we try to optimize time the shorter it gets and it “feels” as if we are always in a hurry!
    Slowly does it.

    1. Time is due to the nature of space. There is an energy that moves through space at a set pace or speed. As we encounter this energy, we become aware of what is called time.
      This means that space acts as a kind of medium or carrier for an energy that moves along in outer space at a set pace. As human beings interact or are impacted by this energy, one becomes aware of time.
      A person’s perception of time depends on the speed he or she is traveling through space. In other words, time is an interaction between the speed that a person is moving through space, and the speed of the ether that is also moving through space.

  3. even a female robot does attention whoring and acts like a bitch ?
    Damn stupid female mindset, even artificial, still rotten.

  4. It’s ok goyim, when the Messiah comes, and he will come, every gentile will be a slave to a Jew and we will possess all the gold and silver in the world. We will be managing more than just time goyim.
    *rubs hands together*

  5. 5. Make a list of tasks for each day and allocate a certain amount of time for their completion. You will find that imposing a temporal limit will cause you to compete with yourself to see if you can do it even faster. (At least that is how it works with me.) Give yourself serious deadlines. Discipline will result in free time that you can actually enjoy because your conscience will be totally clear. (You won’t be watching a movie and thinking “I should be doing my taxes instead.”)

    1. Make a list?
      I believe that’s called obsessive/compulsive behaviour and is considered a mental illness.

      1. @ John Dodds
        By obsessive-compulsive do you mean someone like Adrian Monk? That’s extreme orderliness. Most people are not like that. Besides, lists are quite old… the Ten Commandments and Chamurappi’s Laws were a type of list.

    2. Bla bla bla…
      Everyone’s got a special little ultimate secret self-help hack.
      Why don’t you go make another silly youtube video to add to the vast collection of special motivational Navy SEAL clandestine psychological bullshit already out there?

      1. @TheBasedAndTheBeautiful
        If you are referring to Jocko Willink, he was not the one who instilled discipline in me. It was my parents. The old-fashioned way, without Youtube.

  6. Want to optimize you time?
    Limit your internet to just your smart phone for text and email. Don’t have it in your house, just get enough bandwidth. Have a study and/or workshop.
    Then don’t have a TV. No game consoles.
    I have done it. People marvel at my godlike accomplishments while I’m no different than pre-internet men. Yeah, we did shit back then. Read books, restored cars, planted gardens, took up martial arts, talked to women.
    It’s not about “blame the internet for everything”. The internet is just one more thing that was taken and turned into brain crack. Just like they did for television with cable and reality TV. Just like they did for video games which was intentionally engineered to be like brain crack. Games, TV, and even internet, was around for years. But they were intentionally taken and engineered to waste your time and make YOU the product.
    (I was in the internet back in the 1990s when all of it was like /pol and you can get answers to any technical issue)
    So don’t have internet in your house. That’s how you get productive. Have tools and a place for them instead. We are at the apex of civilization (in spite of everything) where no man has to spend time on getting food and shelter aside from 8 hours of work a day and a man without a wife and kids (two huge time sinks and you get your life relegated to a pathetic man cave) has multitudes more time.
    Imagine if all that waste of time on video games, TV, and “brain crack” activities was turned into productivity. We would have warp drives by now, and it would have been invented in a back yard.

    1. DOKTOR JEEP
      I came of age before Social Media or gaming-I was born in 1974 and Nintendo was state-of-the-art when I was young.
      When I was young I could not afford anything other than basic cable and people had to rent VHS tapes.
      Who the fuck wants to spend their life on FACEBOOK telling strangers their private life?
      What kind of grown man plays video games all day?
      Television is 500 channels of shit-who the fuck cares about some loud crass Italian women in New Jersey that come off as Tony’s “Goomah”? Who the fuck cares about some fat-assed daughters of a greasy lawyer who might have been an accomplice to OJ Simpson’s crime?
      When I was young, men had tactile experiences. You paid prostitutes for sex. You traveled the world to see other places. You gave your E mail or phone number out to friends.
      More than anything else, you tried to make money.
      Why does Gen Y want everyone to know their life on FACEBOOK? Why do THEY want to know everyone’s life on FACEBOOK? Who wants more than an e mail account.
      I cannot understand Gen Y. They don’t want to move out of their house when they are 25. They would rather masturbate to porn than get a prostitute. They watch reality crap on television all day. Playing video games when you an adult man.
      This is why white women are going black and Mestizo and Muslim. Because these assholes, stupid and amoral as they are, act like grown men. They don’t curl up with their male buddy like to 8 year old kids to play video games.

  7. If you’re close enough, ride a bike to work. It’ll handle your exercise for the day, and you’ll start your day off feeling great.

  8. why my comments get deleted every time? is that happening to anyone else?

    1. Push the ‘post comment’ button only once, otherwise it thinks it’s a duplicate comment. I was impatient when it was loading with a poor connection and I pushed ‘post’ repeatedly like whack a mole and every time it rejected it ‘forbidden’. The world is without some great words of wisdom with the comments I lost. Jpst push it once and be patient.

      1. I just clicked once, not duplicates. my comments are regular just like other folks, not trolling or anything. I just wanna know if it was the system failing or some specific reason

  9. What’s next !?
    MONEY/FINANCE
    “How to manage your Checking & Credit card Accounts”
    “How to save more on Groceries”
    “Advantages of shopping at Thriftway”
    LIFE STYLE
    “How to spend quality time in the Weekends”
    “Why not to sleep more than 8 Hours”
    RELATIONS
    “How to get laid for free”
    “Why you should not sleep with fatties”
    Come on guys, what’s going on here !!
    PS: sorry Willy, nothing personal.

  10. I crunched some numbers before the wife’s mat leave ended and found that having a nanny at home wasn’t too much more than daycare – which is toxic for children. So we got the nanny and she does a bunch of housework as well.
    Now I save a ton of time not doing dishes or laundry or mopping etc. It’s allowed for me to increase time on projects and quality time with the wife and kids.
    Leave it for the maid. You are a man with a world to build.
    If you can’t afford a maid, switch to compostable plates and such.

  11. I prefer to do necessary tasks for a limited time on a daily basis while staying in my comfort zone. 365 days of a year are enough to carry out atleat 300 necessary tasks, if carried out daily. Moreover, I believe in my “Karma” and never delegate my tasks onto others intentionally and never allow anybody else to do the same with me. I believe that being a conscious human being, it is our moral duty to repay the mother earth for the resources(food, water, energy, etc.) we have consumed out of her.

    1. Err! How (and when) did Earth became a “mother” !? Who Fathered “her” !? Hmm, may be GOD!
      “Mother” tongue !? ALL the Languages, Grammar, Rules etc., on this Planet are PIONEERED by MEN,
      yet it’s referred as mother tongue !!
      Mother nature, tongue, country, nation; MEN gave enormous respect & (mostly Un-due & Over exaggerated, at least for the last 50 years) Credit, but still the females are “ungrateful” !!

      1. By the term mother, I meant that the very pure nature of a loving mother towards her kids, and not a feminist. As the planet provides us with food, shelter, ability to see aesthetic beauty of landscapes, waterfall, seasons, etc. And to view a variety in life by allowing us to explore things ranging from depths of the sea to the limits of sky and everything else in between. A provider of such gifts(for free) deserves to be called a pure hearted and good willed mother – that serves her kids(people). That’s where the term “mother nature” comes from. It is the job of a mother to be the provider. For father, the job is to protect and nurture.
        Sadly, it is humans who take such enormous creations for granted. As masculine souls, it is our duty
        to be the father and protect this planet(provider) from corporate greed causing all sorts of pollution, gmo’s, deforestation, etc…

  12. One way to optimize your time is just: Have Less Stuff. Less useless possessions. Follow the Marie Kondo method, if it doesn’t “spark joy” in the broadest sense then get rid of it. There’s a monetary and mental holding cost to having a home full of jumble that you never use. Stop with the smartphone and the earphones, have an actual book with you at all times. When you’re working you actual work, you don’t dawdle or think about the future or the past.

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