How to unlock more time in your day

When it comes to wealth, most of us think about money. You measure your financial wealth by looking at your assets and your debts. But there are other areas in your life where you can be wealthy, including time. Would you consider yourself time-affluent or are you living the life of a time pauper? 

“Time wealth is all about freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, and when you trade it for other things,” says Sahil Bloom, author of The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life.

Building time wealth is about awareness and action, says Bloom. Be aware that time is your most precious asset and the one thing that you can never get back. Then act in relation to that awareness by treating time accordingly. 

“Do not allow it to simply exist where you are a passive taker of time,” says Bloom. “Create time for the things that you care about.”

Time and energy 

While you could make more money, you can’t make more time. You can, however, prioritize energy-creating tasks that unlock more time in your day. 

“Outcomes follow energy,” he explains. “The things that you are pulled towards—the things that you have a natural attraction towards—tend to be the things where you end up generating the best outcomes.”

For example, when you’re working on something that interests you, investing a unit of energy could generate 10, 100, or 1,000 times the outcome over something that feels like drudgery. In effect, you unlock time by generating the same output with fewer units of input. You now have more units of input, or energy, that are freed up to do other things.

Identifying energy-creating tasks goes back to awareness and action. For the awareness piece, Bloom recommends creating an energy calendar. Looking at your schedule, color code your activities according to the energy they created or drained. If a task lifts you up and makes you feel energized during or after the activity, mark it green. If it was neutral, mark it yellow. And if you physically felt depleted from the activity, mark it red. After a week, you will have a clear visual perspective of the types of activities that create energy versus drain energy from your life. 

Let energy drive your schedule

Awareness is the starting point for making slight, subtle changes over longer periods of time. While Bloom says you probably won’t be able to eliminate all the energy-draining activities from your life—that’s a bit of a pipe dream—slowly reposition your calendar. For example, prioritize energy-creators at the start of your day to ensure you get the most done. Home in on them and making them a bigger part of your life. 

Also, adjust the energy-draining things to make them less depleting. For example, Bloom worked in a high intensity finance role in 2019 and 2020. Phone calls and video meetings, which consisted of at least five hours of his day, were a huge energy drainer for him. 

“The first reaction when you hear something like this is to think, ‘Well, I can’t change that. That’s a huge part of my job,’” he says. “But if you scrape a layer deeper, you can ask the question, ‘Are there adjustments I can make to the way that I’m doing this that would make it neutral or energy creating?’”

Focus on what drains your energy

Bloom decided he could take some of the calls while on a walk, which created energy because he was outside, moving around. “Also, I can’t multitask when I’m walking, so I’m more focused, more present on the call,” he says. “I took half of my phone calls and made them into walking calls. I was still doing the exact same work, but I was doing it in a way that was significantly more energy creating, which led to significantly better outcomes.”

Another way to let energy drive your schedule is by batching activities to leverage the different levels. For example, confine some of the energy drainers to a single block, so you aren’t hitting speed bumps throughout the day. Another suggestion is to put two energy creating activities around an energy draining activity.

“Manage them more effectively, so that you can get through to the other side more efficiently and in a happier date of mind,” says Bloom.

Prioritizing what matters

The entire point of considering time a state of wealth is to recognize that it is your most precious asset, and you need to intentionally design our time now. In fact, Bloom argues that the most dangerous word in the dictionary is “later.” 

“We say it to ourselves all the time,” he says. “I’ll spend more time with my kids later. I’ll prioritize my relationship with my partner and friends later. I’ll find my purpose later. ‘Later’ becomes another word for ‘never,’ because those things won’t exist in the same way. Later, your kid won’t be five years old. Later, your partner and friends won’t be there for you if you’re not there for them now. You won’t magically wake up with purpose later.”

Investing time now will pay off in dividends later, creating time wealth that can be richer than money can buy.

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