During the month of May and the first half of June, I kept a time diary. Several times throughout the day (as often as possible, in fact), I recorded how I had spent my time in as much detail as possible, without judgment, and saved all of these notes.

After allowing a couple months to pass, I sat down with all of these notes in August to try to piece together how exactly I spend my time, how I was wasting it, and how I could use it better.

I found this to be a really useful experience, so I decided to share it with you.

What’s a time diary?
Simply put, it’s a document where you record what you’re doing throughout the day in as much detail as is reasonably possible. So, for example, I might write:

6:45 AM – Woken up by my daughter and struggle out of bed
6:50 AM – Make breakfast for the family
7:10 AM – Eat breakfast
7:25 AM – Get together clothes for everyone
7:30 AM – Everyone gets dressed
7:45 AM – Take children to preschool
8:10 AM – Check email
…

You get the idea. The more detail you can add, the more useful this will all be.

What’s the use of a time diary?
When you are just entering the data into the diary, it doesn’t really serve any use at all. It’s just a recording mechanism.

Instead, a time diary comes in handy later on, when you have a month or two of data to look at and analyze. With this level of information, you can pore over the data carefully and often find some very interesting things about how you use your time and what you could do to use it more effectively.

Five useful things I got out of my time diary
The easiest way to demonstrate how a time diary is useful is to jump straight to the conclusions. Here are five things (out of a much larger set) that I’ve concluded from my time diary.

I would initially get a “hunch” about these things while reading the entries, then I’d find some way to extract that information to see if the “hunch” was right. Often, it was.

I used the May and June 2011 pages on a wall calendar with large spaces for the checkmarks and numbers I mention below. This let me easily compare days.

1. A poor night of sleep doesn’t affect me until two days later. Let’s say that I don’t get much sleep between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning. I’ll usually be just fine on Wednesday, but I find that on Thursday I’ll waste a bunch of time and be much less productive than usual. I suspect that on Wednesday, I’m running on some sort of reserve, and my sleep on Wednesday recharges that reserve but doesn’t recharge me all that much.

I found this fact by taking the calendar, checking each night that I got less than seven hours of sleep with a red marker, and writing the number of obviously unproductive hours on each day with a black marker. The source of the information, of course, was my time diary.

I can change my behavior because of this by accounting for lethargy on those days. If I get a poor night of sleep, I’ll try to be extra productive on that following day because I know that the day after that will be a poor one. I’ll save mindless tasks for those days.

2. The more I interact with my children, the bigger the productivity boost is the following day. If I have a day where I spend a ton of time just with my children, the next day is usually a productive one. I’m not sure why, actually. However, I’ll say that yesterday, we took the children to the grocery store, watched a movie with them, rode our bicycles to a park, played there for a while, and rode home, and today I feel really productive.

I found this fact by counting the number of hours spent each day with my children, then comparing that to unproductive hours the following day.

I can change my behavior because of this by keeping my commitment to spend focused time with my children each day. Not only is this interaction good for both of us in that moment, it apparently also bumps up my productivity down the road. In fact, it pushes me even more toward scheduling “special days” where we do things like go to the Science Center of Iowa together.

3. Time spent reading usually increases my productivity for the next two or three days. One thing I measured is how many articles I completed per day. I found that if I spent two hours or more on a given day reading, the following day would see production of about one more article than average and the day after that would see a bump of about half an article more than average. I think the connection is that reading helps me with my ability to come up with phrases for the ideas floating around in my head.

I found this fact by simply noting the time spent each day reading and the number of articles produced each day. I averaged the number of articles I am able to write in a “working day” and then would compare that to the number of articles on each day, writing a + or – figure in the square as well.

I can change my behavior because of this by minimizing the little amount of television I currently watch and replacing it with a good book.

4. The longer the gaps between time spent cleaning my office, the lower my productivity. If I stop and clean my office once every week or two, I tend to be more productive than if I just let it go for a while.

I found this fact by using the calendar, recording the number of unproductive hours each day, and marking the days I cleaned my office with a pink highlighter. I found that the farther from an office cleaning I was, the less productive I was each day. It was a small impact, but a real one.

I can change my behavior because of this by cleaning my office more regularly. I’ve started setting aside time on Friday afternoons solely for the purpose of cleaning things up and making little changes, like installing a wall-mounted bookshelf for some of my most frequently accessed books.

5. My optimum amount of sleep is about eight hours, and it’s best if I wake up on my own and am not awakened by someone or something else. If I sleep much less than that, it tends to move into the “poor night of sleep” category and affects me down the road. If I’m awakened by an alarm clock (on occasion) or a child (much more frequently), it definitely has an impact on my day.

I found this fact by again using the calendar, checking the nights where my sleep was interrupted with a green marker, and writing my unproductive time on each date with a black marker. It works well with the first fact I discovered.

I can change my behavior because of this by going to sleep a little earlier. If I go to sleep earlier, I tend to rise with my children or even before them and I rarely need an alarm clock. This creates more naturally productive days.

Simply put, the entire purpose of a time diary is to figure out simple things you can change that make a big impact on your day-to-day life. I learned how much of an impact spending a couple hours cleaning my office can really have. I learned how direct the positive impact of reading is on my life. I learned that going to bed around ten during the school week is probably optimal.

These little things make a huge difference in my weekly productivity. They seem like small tweaks, but the impact of these tweaks is felt during every hour of every day in the form of increased energy and alertness and mental productivity. This adds up to more income and more life enjoyment as well.

Those types of discoveries are well worth the time that such a task takes up. It really can change your life in a positive way.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was able to create, launch, and build up The Simple Dollar during my leisure time in the evenings after work over a two year period. Simply put, I filled much of my leisure time with this site, day after day, week after week, month after month, until it had built up a revenue stream large enough that I felt comfortable enough to start doing it full time.

This is something that I often encourage readers to do for themselves. If you’re passionate about something, fill your leisure time with it and see if you can build it into something you can do for a career.

There’s a key word I’m using here. Leisure. It’s the distinction between leisure time and idle time that often catches people off guard and makes them feel as though they don’t possibly have time to engage in such an activity.

Here’s a great example of what I mean.

There was a time, early in my career, where if I came home from work and felt tired, I’d flop on the couch and channel surf for an hour or so until my wife came home. At that point, I’d get up and lethargically start making dinner with her. After dinner, I’d often still feel beat, so I’d just play a video game or something else that didn’t require a ton of effort from me.

If that were my evening routine, I would have never been able to build up The Simple Dollar. It simply wouldn’t work.

Now, flash forward to 2006. What did I do then if I came home from work tired?

Simple. I’d directly address the tiredness. I’d go into the bedroom, lay down on the bed, close my eyes, and let sleep take me away.

When my wife arrives home, I’ve spent the last hour doing as much as I could to address my tiredness, leaving me much more capable of utilizing the rest of the evening in a successful way.

The same thing happens in the late evening. Let’s say it’s ten o’clock and Sarah and I have just watched an episode of a television series that we both enjoy. I’m feeling tired but, for some reason, I don’t want to go to bed yet.

A few years ago, I would have channel-surfed or played a video game for the next hour. Now? I’ll go prep tomorrow night’s supper or do some laundry or something like that, pushing me to being tired enough for bed while – and this is key – getting something time-consuming out of the way for tomorrow.

This, of course, leaves tomorrow night more wide open than before, which gives me time to play tag in the yard with my son and daughter and a game with my wife after the kids are in bed.

Leisure time is time spent engaged in an activity for my own personal enjoyment or growth. Idle time, on the other hand, is time spent on whatever activity happens to be at hand. In short, I try to find room in my life for genuine leisure time and avoid idle time.

Some obvious questions pop up.

What if I’m too tired for an engaged activity? Simple: get some genuine rest. Go to bed early. If adequate sleep isn’t doing the trick, work on your diet or talk to your doctor. If you’re doing certain things (like simply sitting there channel surfing) because you’re too tired to do anything else, then you need to make some other changes to your life.

What if I can’t think of anything to do? This can only be true if you have no goals in your life, no desire to find a better job, nothing you wish to improve at, and no activities that you find enjoyable. If all of these are true, then I would suggest talking to your doctor, as I would suspect depression.

What if I just want to “veg out”? There’s nothing at all wrong with a relaxing activity as long as you’re making a conscious choice to engage in it and it’s not done out of idleness.

I’ll give you an example. Sarah and I have watched several different science fiction TV series via Netflix by watching roughly three episodes a week. We set aside that time to just kick back and enjoy the show at hand. We get comfortable in the basement, enjoy the show together, then turn off the television when it’s over and do somthing else.

We don’t idle afterwards, channel surfing. We don’t talk ourselves out of going to bed just to see what’s on the other channel. If we’re tired, we go to bed. If we’re not tired, we’ll go find another activity to do together. If one of us is tired, that one goes to bed and the other stays up to do something else.

What if my leisure time is completely filled with other activities? Committees. Boards. Bible studies. Book groups. Game nights. Boy Scouts. It’s easy to fill up a schedule with so many responsibilities that it feels like you have no time for anything else.

It’s important to remember, though, that you’ve chosen to fill your leisure time with these things. If you’re happy with those choices, great! If you’re not happy with those choices, step back from the ones that give you pause and look for new ways to use that time.

Genuine leisure time is valuable – and more abundant than you think. If you separate it from idle time, it can provide all the space you need to take on personal goals and get involved in things you might not otherwise enjoy. Without it, I would have never been able to start The Simple Dollar and have such a powerful opportunity to bond with my family.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

168 hours?

That’s the number of hours in seven days – a typical week. The premise behind this book by Laura Vanderkam is that we misuse a lot of the time during that week, either through excuses or sacrifices or misplaced priorities. Because of that, we find ourselves not having time for the stuff that’s genuinely important to us, leaving us feeling as though our lives are out of whack.

Vanderkam’s approach is to simply wipe the slate entirely clean. Assume that all 168 hours of your week are free. From there, you start filling in stuff according to their true priority for you – and when that week is full, find ways to dump things that really aren’t a priority for you.

It’s an interesting process, one that I’ve attempted to do over the last few weeks.

The Myth of the Time Crunch
Vanderkam’s main argument is spelled out here. The idea that we’re under a “time crunch” is a myth. The real crisis all of us are under is more along the lines of misuse of time. We spend our time doing things that aren’t very high on our real personal priority list. It’s not just the time we waste doing unimportant stuff. It’s also the time we spend being productive towards ends that really don’t mean very much in our life.

I’ll use myself for an example. Quite often, when I hit a temporary roadblock in my writing, I’ll spend some time doing something else fairly idle at my desk, like surfing the web or visiting a few messageboards that I like to post on. That time spent is really ineffective. The entire point is to get my wheels turning, so why not do something that’s actually in line with something important in my life? I could go to the gym or take a walk (personal health). I could prepare a meal for later so I have more time this evening to spend with my kids. I could go read something completely unrelated for half an hour. I could go take a nap. I could write a letter to someone I care about.

All of these things are more in line with my core values than the time I spend there idling. If I start looking at my whole life in that way, it’s pretty easy to start identifying things I spend my time on that are less important to me and replacing them with things that are more important to me that I sometimes feel I don’t have time for.

Vanderkam suggests starting this process by keeping a time diary of your week, listing what you’re doing every fifteen minutes throughout the week. It’s actually easier than it seems and it can be really useful if you’re honest with it.

Your Core Competencies
What things do you do that others consider you to be very good at? What things do you recognize that others do better than you do? Spend some time on those questions, because those questions point you towards your core competencies.

Vanderkam argues that one of the best time management tactics you can use is to find ways to maximize the first group of things and offload the second group of things onto others. Let’s say, for example, that you’re really good dealing with groups of children and not so good dealing with laundry, consider offering a Saturday night babysitting service for several families and then use that money to pay for laundry service. You’ve suddenly turned a block of time spent on something you hate (laundry) into a block of time spent on something you find fulfilling (child care).

The Right Job
You spend an awful lot of your 168 hours per week working. Vanderkam offers up these questions to start applying these ideas to your work, on page 79:

Does my job tap into my intrinsic motivations (things I loved as a kid or would do for free)?
Does my job give me a reasonable amount of autonomy?
Am I challenged regularly to the extent of my abilities?
Do my work environment, organization, and coworkers encourage my best work?
If the answer is “no” to any of these four questions, what can I change? In the next week? In the next year?
Can I create the right job within my organization? Another organization? Or will I need to go out on my own?

The key argument behind all of this is in order to do a job well, it needs to match up well with your core competencies and your own interests and it needs to have people involved that encourage you to do well. If these elements are present, it’s easy for anyone to do well, earn raises, earn promotions, and so on. If these elements aren’t present, it quickly becomes much harder to achieve success.

I’ve worked at jobs that have succeeded in some of these areas and utterly failed in others. When more of these things were in line (as my work environment was in about 2002 to 2003 and as it has been for the last few years), I’ve been able to do very well. When fewer of these things were in line, it was harder to succeed in any way.

Controlling Your Calendar
The obvious conclusion from the previous section of the book is that doing work you want to be doing will make you more efficient, while doing work you don’t want to be doing makes you less efficient.

If you keep drawing out that idea, it begins to make sense that any time and effort you can put into reorienting your work towards the things you’re good at and the things you enjoy will make you a better worker.

I’ll use an example of a person I know who is a manager of a convenience store. She got that job because she’s worked there a long time and has a reputation of being very friendly with the customers and other employees. Instead of following the standard practices of managing there (which seemed to involve a lot of report writing), she basically cut out the vast majority of the reports, trimming them down to the bare minimum, and decided she could do her job most effectively (minimizing turnover, maximizing profits) by spending her time out on the floor, sharpening up the little things, talking to customers, keeping the employees happy and feeling well-liked, and sometimes doing things like stepping in for an employee who needed to leave to take care of a sick child.

That place is now so busy that you can barely find a spot at the pumps or in the parking lot. Why? The interior is sparkling. Everyone in there seems happy and having fun. There is always an extra person around if you need them (often the manager herself).

She’s doing a killer job. Best of all, she’s really happy doing it.

Anatomy of a Breakthrough
Where do you want your career to go next? What do you think of as the “next level” for your career that you actually want?

Spend some time talking to people who have actually done it and achieved what you’re thinking about and ask them how they got there. Then, spend your time following their advice and also polishing your core competencies. Spend a focused hour or two per day doing those things instead of engaging in idle workplace activity.

The New Home Economics
Most of the ideas stated above that pertain to the workplace can also be achieved at home. At home, the biggest, most important blocks are the high-impact times you spend with your spouse, your children, and your closest friends. After that is high-value leisure – things you get a great deal of personal value from doing.

Most of us, though, spend an awful lot of our time at home in low-value activities – channel surfing, flipping through magazines, staring in a daze out the window, surfing the internet for “funny” things, and so on.

Often, we do that because we’re tired. Almost always, the best exchange you can do is to turn an hour of that low-value stuff into a half an hour of additional sleep and a half an hour of high-value stuff. So, instead of watching an hour of a late night television program, go to bed half an hour earlier and spend half an hour with your kid or your spouse each day doing something that you’ll both get a lot of value out of.

Don’t Do Your Own Laundry
If there are household tasks that you loathe that eat up your time, don’t do them. Don’t be afraid to ship out the tasks that you hate so that others can do them, provided you then fill that time with something high-value. You don’t have to replace things you get personal value from – just focus on the things that are less important to you.

Of course, this hinges on having good personal finances. If you’re barely managing to break even with what you have, you won’t have this option on the table. This is yet another valuable reason to get your spending under control. Quite often, rampant spending is the result of trying to take the edge off of stress in your life. If you reduce that spending for a bit and keep your eye on the ball, you can start seeking out ways to directly minimize that stress.

A Full Life
A full life doesn’t mean one that’s packed to the brim with scheduled activities and plans. A full life is one where each moment simply has some sort of actual meaning and purpose. If you feel tired, don’t just do something idle – sleep. If you feel like a relationship in your life isn’t what you want it to be, spend some idle time communicating with that person. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to learn how to do, start learning how to do it.

Time spent in that fashion is always valuable and always leads to a full life. If you fill as many moments as possible with something with genuine meaning (or doing something that prepares for those moments), you’ll always feel like you have a life chock full of meaning.

Is 168 Hours Worth Reading?
168 Hours does a great job of forcing you to think deeply about how you spend your time and whether that choice actually adds value to your overall life. It’s very powerful in terms of thought exercise.

To me, 168 Hours works best if it’s paired with a book that’s strong on the actual mechanics of reorganizing your time, like Getting Things Done. While 168 Hours may be a bit mechanically short, it’s philosophically rich.

While I didn’t come up with any great system for reorganizing my time after reading this book, I did find myself thinking deeply about how I utilize my time and energy and it pushed me into making some interesting and challenging decisions. If a book makes you look at your life in such a fashion, it’s a success.

Check out additional reviews and notes of 168 Hours on Amazon.com.

Tom left a great comment on the recent article about taking care of your things:

How can you fight off “I’ll do it tomorrow”-ness? My lack of motivation makes me lazy, even though I see the benefits of not being like this.

Procrastination is a big enemy of financial progress. It’s easy to say “I’ll do it tomorrow” about countless maintenance, frugality, and money management tasks. I do it all the time myself, and I’m one of the more proactive people I know.

How do you get around it? How can you make yourself do all of the “important but not urgent” things you need to get done in your life, when it’s so easy to put them off and just kick back?

Here are the tactics I personally use to make it happen.

I don’t overwhelm myself with a to-do list. If you sat down and made a list of all of the little “important but not urgent” things that you need to do in your life, you’d have a monstrous list.

Give it a try right now in your head for the next minute. Just go through your life and think of all of the stuff that you’d like to get done – that’s important to get done – but it’s not urgent. The books and articles you’d like to read. The home and auto maintenance you’d like to get done. The financial tasks you ought to take care of. The people you should get in touch with.

The list will be painfully huge, and it’ll probably seem overwhelming.

Instead, I make a short list each day. Instead of deciding that list is overwhelming, I break it down. I tackle two or three or four of the items on that list every day.

Which ones? If they’re all important and not urgent, it doesn’t matter – I just tackle whatever’s at the top of the list. Sometimes, though, one item or another does take precedence – it’s something that needs to be done regularly.

In that case…

I use Google Calendar to plan the daily list in advance. I just add an all day event for a task that needs to be done and drag it around to whatever day I want to do it. If I have a thing I’d like to do, I just scroll ahead several days and stick it in on the first day that doesn’t have much going on.

The big advantage here is that it allows me to set up recurring events, for things like regular auto or home maintenance or health tasks like setting up a dentist appointment. These automatically appear in place on the day I ought to do them, so I can easily just shuffle stuff around it.

When that daily list is finished, I can kick back without guilt. So, each day I have three or four “important but not urgent” tasks that I should get done – an amount that isn’t overwhelming. I can get through them in a half an hour or an hour or so.

Once they’re done, I’m done. Sure, I have other “important but not urgent” tasks I should get to, but that’s what future days are for. I’ve taken care of what I’ve assigned myself today (which isn’t overwhelming), so I can kick back and play with my kids without feeling I’m letting something down. I know it’s all in place.

If it’s a big task, I break it down into little pieces. Big tasks are easy to postpone, so I break them down. I don’t have a task like “clean the house” or even “clean the office.” It’ll be something simple like “go through the bookshelf in my office.” I don’t do things like “fix my relationship with person X,” I instead do something like “write person X an email” or “give person X a phone call.”

Usually, at the end of such a task that’s just one part of a bigger puzzle, I immediately record the next step that needs to be done as another task. I fire up Google Calendar and jot it down immediately, putting it in place.

I keep a notepad and pen with me so I don’t forget those “important but not urgent” tasks when they come to me. “Important but not urgent” tasks pop into my head all the time. I just keep a notepad with me to jot them down as they come to mind. Once a day or so, I go through the things in my notepad and make sure they’re handled.

Sometimes, I’ll just do those things immediately. Other times, I’ll just toss it up on my calendar, adding another thing that needs to get done.

Always remember that procrastination is the mortal enemy of all of the “important but not urgent” things in your life, and often it’s those things that separate the people who get things done and succeed from those who fall behind.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

I cover time management quite a lot on The Simple Dollar. I write about Getting Things Done and other time management books. I talk about how I manage my own time and some of the techniques I use in my own life.

Almost always, I’ll receive an email or a comment or two about how this has nothing to do with money. On the surface, that might be true – I’m not mentioning the almighty dollar anywhere. If you dig even a little, though, it becomes clear: time management is the same thing as money management, because time is money.

Step back for a minute and think about it.

Each person is blessed with the same allotment of time – 168 hours per week. Bill Gates has 168 hours per week. I have 168 hours per week. You have 168 hours per week. Each of us sleep during some of those hours, leaving us with perhaps 120 waking hours during a given week.

Out of those 120 waking hours, many of us sell the majority of those hours to someone else in exchange for money. We go to work, we work for a while, we go home, and often, some work comes home with us. Add in the hours we burn thinking about work and our time for ourselves grows ever smaller.

Household chores eat up more of that time, as does personal hygiene. Soon, we find that we’re left with just a small pile of hours in a given week to do with what we please.

Those hours are precious. They’re the ones in which we relax. They’re the ones where we interact with friends and family. They’re the ones where we catch up on personally fulfilling hobbies.

But we pay a hefty price for those hours. We invest so much time in work, hygiene, and household chores so that those remaining hours bring us some semblance of joy. Most of our financial choices are intended to either make those free hours more enjoyable or to make them safer.

Whenever we find ourselves wasting time, we take directly away from those precious hours. We get behind at work, reducing our ability to earn more and thus taking away from the enjoyment of that time or the safety of it. We waste idle time at home and then when something truly worthwhile comes along, we can’t participate – we have too many other things we’re behind on.

To put it simply, wasting time takes away from those valuable hours that we work so hard for. It strips away their quality and it strips away their safety. Time management simply seeks to give us more of those hours – or to make the other hours produce more money.

Here’s an example. Some days, when I sit down to work, I make the decision to dive right in. I’ve got some big idea on my mind and I can’t wait to research it or plan out how I might use it. So I’ll rip through most of an article in thirty minutes or so – and then find myself at a dead end. Where am I going with this? I idle for a bit, then eventually delete the article. I’ve wasted forty minutes.

On another day, I’ll start off by making a list of all of the things I need to accomplish for the day. I’ll decide what posts I’m going to write and list the main idea of each one. Then I’ll take each of those ideas and spend a bit of time fleshing them out – is this even worth a post? Is it perhaps more than one post? What research do I need to do to make it work?

That process might take twenty minutes, but I’ve usually discarded three or four ideas along the way and fleshed out three or four more to the point that I know what I’m going to write. From there, I never find myself “lost” at work – I know what tasks I need to do, I execute them, and I keep on rolling to the next one.

I might have spent the first twenty minutes of my day not moving forward at all on any projects, which seems bad. But the time invested in time management pays off – I don’t have to worry about such details as the day goes on, allowing myself to focus on just getting things done. Thus, by the six hour mark, I’m usually far ahead in terms of my work if I’ve done that planning. The big part? I’ve drastically reduced my wasted time.

The end result? If I’m a couple hours ahead, I now have hours I can add to my personal life. Or, perhaps I can use them to work ahead, giving those personal hours more of a cushion in case something happens. Maybe I can spend an hour getting in touch with others, building relationships that will really pay off over time. Maybe I can work on another project that might lead to more earnings or more readers, both of which shore up the valuable parts of my life.

Time is money, and when you manage your time well, you manage your money well, too.

How do you do that? Here are the four most valuable little techniques I’ve found for managing my time.

1. Start your day off with some planning. Make a list of what you need to get done today – usually four or so things. Don’t just make a 1, 2, 3, 4 list, though – investigate each one for a few minutes and make sure you have the information, ideas, and materials you need to actually execute each item. That might mean spending five or ten minutes on the basic framework of a task, but doing that now means you won’t burn an hour chasing snipe later on. Also, that list of things to do will keep you from burning time in the middle of the day wondering what’s best to do next.

2. Alternate between multi-tasking and single-tasking sessions. Multi-tasking works well for some tasks – phone calls, emails, filing, and so forth. Those are tasks that usually aren’t mentally taxing at all, and thus can be done two or more at a time. However, the meat and potatoes of your work usually does require your focus – and doing that with interruptions makes it take longer and reduces the quality of your work. Take a few periods during your day, turn off your communication routes (turn off your phone, close your email program, etc.) for an hour or so and bear down on a task that needs to be done. When it’s finished, go back into multitasking mode and get caught up on your messages and information.

3. Meditate. This sounds counterintuitive, but it really works. It’s easy, later in the day, to “zone out” – you’re mentally (and perhaps physically) worn out. Many people keep pushing, but they find themselves losing three minutes here and three minutes there because they space off – and this will often spread into the evening’s personal time. Instead, try meditating for fifteen or twenty minutes near the end of your work day. Just sit in a chair and relax – here are several great basic techniques to try. I almost always find myself refreshed and alert after doing this.

4. Write down the things on your mind. Keep a notebook and pen near you at all times. Whenever something pops into your head that you need to do later or think about later, jot it down immediately. Then, a few times a day, leaf through the notebook and take care of the things jotted down there. Throw down anything and everything – a word you want to look up, a personal task you need to take care of, a person you want to get in touch with. Getting these things out of your head and onto paper means you can spend far less mental energy trying to remember it – and use that energy instead focusing on your current task and getting that done as well as you can.

Another important tactic is to find ways to spend your free time that simultaneously help you grow as a person and bring you enjoyment. Reading literature that really pushes your mind is one example. Going for a jog is another example. Almost any social activity falls into this group, too – learning how to interact with more people is invaluable. Such activities bleed back into the rest of your day – they increase your energy at work, improve your mental acuity, and raise the bar on your ability to interact with others and network. Putting forth a little effort to find enjoyable ways to spend your spare time that also help you to grow pays off over and over again.

Remember, time is money – so stop wasting it.

One common question I’m asked a lot is how we actually balance our work lives and our family lives. Barb sums it up best:

How do you do it? You write tons and tons of stuff for The Simple Dollar, your wife works a full time job, you seem to have tons of time available for your kids, you read quite a bit, and you also seem to have a somewhat active social life. How do you do it? Do you not sleep?

There are a handful of tricks to making this all work. I’ll outline several, but I’ll start with the big one.

The line between work and family is pretty blurry at our house.
As I’ve mentioned before, I set aside a block of time each day to spend with the kids – and my wife does the same. This block usually goes from about 5:30 in the evening until 8:30 in the evening, with the last half-hour or so involving one of us putting the kids to bed while the other one does something else.

Outside of that, the lines between work and family are really blurry at our home. We’ll engage in family activities and in the middle, I’ll yank out my pocket notebook and jot down some notes. I’ll read books for review for The Simple Dollar in the late evenings when my wife is enjoying a piece of meaty fiction. My wife (who is a teacher) will grade papers on the way to an activity while I’m driving, or I’ll gather notes while she’s driving. Sometimes she even helps out with background tasks for The Simple Dollar, brainstorming ideas, correcting posts, and even helping with writing tasks here and there.

It’s not uncommon for us to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a movie in the family room. The kids will choose a Pixar movie we’ve seen a dozen times and my wife and I will fire up our laptops, hers to record some grades and mine to answer some emails.

It doesn’t feel intrusive – at least not to me – because I enjoy the work so much. I love to write. I love to communicate with readers (in fact, I love it so much that I often get behind simply because I want to respond to as many emails as I can). It just feels – most of the time – like just another enjoyable thing to do in my life.

During the school year, the kids do go to daycare, a decision we put a lot of thought into before we chose it. The biggest reason, actually, was for the kids themselves – there are cognitive benefits and health benefits to such attendance. That doesn’t mean that we dump them at the door and run – I often spend days with them, taking them to the Science Center of Iowa or to the library or to the park – but I do try to maximize the time they’re at daycare, doing tasks that they can’t participate in (my work) or would greatly hinder.

The end result of all of this is that my children get my undivided attention vastly more than they did when I was working a full time job. When I had work intruding on my life then, I was either out of the house or mentally distracted when I should have been spending time with them. Now, when they need me and something work-related is on my mind, I have the freedom to slam the door on work whenever I choose. Plus, because I enjoy my work, I also have the freedom to pick it up whenever time allows without hating how it’s interfering with what I want to do – it is what I want to do.

We own one television – and it’s rarely on.
In the last month, the television’s primary use has been twofold. It’s kept us up to date with local storm coverage (since we’ve had some awful weather as of late) and it’s provided the source of our “family movie night,” where all four of us (once a week or so) watch a movie together. Other than that, I think it’s been on roughly two hours (to watch True Blood).

That’s it. The only television we own is down in the basement, and we simply don’t go down there that often. We’re too busy doing other things that we enjoy – activities that often involve active interaction with our children (like drawing pictures or building a giant model railroad).

We do lots of household chores together as a family.
We cook meals together. We clean together. We work on art projects together. We wrap presents together. We do dishes together.

Virtually any task that the children can possibly participate in is done in a social fashion. Everyone gets more out of it if we work together. Sure, there might be minor setbacks when the children get involved, but they offer a lot of help, too. Even our twenty one month old daughter can scrape plates and put them in the dishwasher (seriously) and our three year old loves stirring cookie batter.

The more things like this that we do together as a family, the tighter we bond and the more real world skills our kids have. Doing things this way turns household chores into opportunities for family bonding – and often gets things done just as fast, if not faster.

Many of our friends are also parents.
If you’re friends with parents that have children of a similar age, they’re much more understanding about things like taking kids to the bathroom or washing their hands. They’re also much more likely to be helpful when you need a hand, and you have a lot of experiences and advice worth sharing.

Here’s a perfect example. My wife had four bridesmaids at our wedding – two of them were her sisters and the other two were long-time friends. Today, one of those friends has a son that’s literally one day younger than our own, while the other has a daughter in between the ages of our kids and an infant son. The children have become part of the social bonds tying them all together.

Thus, our roles as parents and as social creatures overlap.

We choose enriching things for our relaxation time.
So when do we relax? Almost every evening, my wife and I spend some time unwinding. That time, though, is often spent reading or playing a game that requires some thinking. Last night, we both read for an hour and a half, side by side, before bed. The night before that, we played Dominion over a bottle of wine.

In short, we make an effort to keep our minds “on” as much as possible during the day.

Turning my mind “off” is done in a very focused way.
Obviously, though, being “on” all the time isn’t the best thing, so I have what I think of as an extremely focused “off” time each day. I meditate/pray for about twenty minutes – I clear my mind and do a few very basic relaxation techniques. Often, if I do this later in the day, I find myself hugely mentally refreshed for the evening instead of burnt out after a lot of work.

I used to try to do something like this during my commute, but it never really worked well, so eventually I settled on meditating/praying right when I got home. It’s a late afternoon tradition for me that I’ve used ever since – and it makes a huge difference in my energy and alertness in the evenings.

Doing these things – blending work and parenting and play, meditating, socializing with other parents, and engaging in activities that are usually mentally enriching – has been invaluable for juggling all the roles we have without needing to shell out the cash to bring in extra help (like a housecleaner, for example).

As I’ve mentioned many times before, I start off every day with a pretty full to-do list – usually numbering twenty items or so. On a good day, I’ll accomplish most of them – write a few posts for The Simple Dollar, answer email, check the comments, handle some correspondence, work on another writing project, read a few chapters in a book, do some household tasks, and so on.

Inevitably, though, my list at the end of the day has a few things left on it – the things left undone. Quite often, these things are the low priority tasks that I’d like to accomplish during a given day.

The obvious question is why are there things on my to-do list that I regularly don’t accomplish? Obviously, I’m overstocking my to-do list each day – something that a lot of people do. When I put things on that list, I genuinely want to accomplish all of the things on the list, but I simply run out of time to get all of those things done.

Those things left behind eventually dig at me. I want to accomplish them, but I sometimes seem to never get around to them. What kind of things? I want to make another batch of homemade beer, followed by a batch of homemade wine. I want to write more short stories. I want to devote more time to reading for my own enjoyment. I want to rearrange the furniture in my office. I want to add a bunch of shelving to the garage. The list goes on and on.

This probably sounds familiar to you. I know it sounds familiar to a lot of the people I spent Christmas vacation with. I brought up this situation in various forms to different people, and almost to a tee, they all identified with it. Even my nine year old nephew did to a degree – he mentioned a book that he’s wanted to read for a while, but never opened.

Here’s the catch, though. In a few months, I will have done most of these things.

Sure, on a day to day basis, I do leave things undone, and those things do bother me. However, instead of just leaving those little things undone, I use several tactics to actually make sure that I do get around to them.

Here’s the game plan for getting around to those little things you’d like to find time to do.

Make one of them a priority today. The biggest reason that things on your list get left there is because you view other things as having a higher priority.

On my to-do list, there are usually a few things that are of the highest priority for the day. For me, that’s usually keeping up with my required writing – I need to stay ahead with my written words, after all. I usually build my day around those tasks and fill in the gaps with other tasks of less importance, but still need to get done – like reading email.

My solution? I take one of those tasks I’ve been neglecting and make it a top priority for the day. So, for example, today my “suddenly high priority” task is cleaning up my office – along with my writing, I’ll consider today a successful day if I get my office arranged the way I want it.

Do one of the tasks first thing in the morning. Another approach that works well for me is to do this low-priority task first thing in the morning, just as I start my day. This works well because of the flexibility of my schedule, since I can take on personal tasks at the start of my “work day,” but it also works in many office environments particularly if the task is related to your job.

Put off those big “essential” tasks that you start your day with (for me, I usually start off with writing whatever I think will be the most difficult article of the day) and start your day with that simple task. Don’t check your email. Don’t get started on the task of the moment. Instead, get that little thing that you’ve wanted to do out of the way. Write that little bit of code that needs to be written. Read a chapter of that book you’ve been intending to read. Get that office clean. Get that sticky correspondence out of the way.

Re-evaluate your use of time. If you’re consistently bothered by the things left undone, it might indicate that some of your life priorities are out of order at the moment.

Start by taking a serious look at the things you spend your time on during the day, from the minute you wake up until the minute you go to sleep. What things are you doing during that time that you would describe as very low priority? What things are you doing that seem redundant, pointless, or a waste of your time? What things are you doing that could easily be bridged with other things?

For example, let’s say the thing you’ve always wanted to do is start reading some classic literature, but you can’t find time for it. You don’t watch television, your job is jam packed, and so on. But, when you look at your daily schedule, you notice that you’re burning twenty minutes or so during your daily commute, and you’re usually just listening to talk radio. Why not turn off Glenn Beck and turn on an audiobook of For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Typical places to look for extra time include time devoted to entertainment (like that evening television block), time devoted to commuting, time devoted to gaming, time devoted to … avoiding work by surfing the ‘net, and so on. Just replace these things with some of the things you wish you had time for and suddenly you may find yourself getting things done.

Eliminate a few of your responsibilities. For some, though, the above tactics won’t help – they really are jammed to the brim and they’re leaving things on the table that they should be addressing.

If you’re in this situation, your schedule is overstuffed. You’re walking a tightrope and eventually you’re going to trip, fall, and drop something important.

This means that it’s time to start looking at eliminating a few of your responsibilities. It may be time to step back from some of your volunteer responsibilities – perhaps you can resign from a board you serve on or can step down at the end of a sports season when you coach. It might even be time to have a discussion with your work supervisor about the things on your plate in the workplace.

Every schedule needs some breathing room – without it, you’re begging for disaster. Now’s the time to start making some space in your own schedule.

Ask for help. One effective strategy for clearing out an overburdened schedule is to simply ask for help. Are there not items on your daily to-do list that couldn’t be easily handled with the aid of others? Here are three options for getting some assistance with your to-dos – so you have time to take care of all the things you want to do.

Delegate. If you’re in a position where you have the ability to move some of your most mundane tasks to another worker, take advantage of that. Delegate some of your busywork to an administrative assistant or to a lower-ranking employee. In some situations (I found myself in this situation, once upon a time), if your work load is full of mundane tasks that are keeping you from excelling in the “big” tasks of your job, you can ask for an assistant to help you with these mundane things – freeing you to achieve the things you’ve been aching to accomplish.

Ask. If you need help with the activities in your life, just ask for help from those around you. Ask your spouse to help out more with household tasks. Ask your friends for a break from some of your engagements with them so you have time to recharge your batteries. Ask your family members to help out with some of the personal responsibilities you’ve taken on helping with a sick family member. Just ask – if you’re a giving person, those around you will often step up to help you.

Trade. If there are tasks in your life that you struggle with, perhaps you might be able to clear up some time by trading skills with someone. For example, if you’re struggling with a computer that doesn’t work well – the crashes keep you from getting work done – offer to trade the skills you do have to a person who can tune up your computer. If you have kids, offer to swap babysitting nights with the parents of a couple of your child’s friends – that way, you’ll have a couple free evenings a month that won’t cost you anything in exchange for one night of focused babysitting.

Often, the little things in life are the ones we are most proud to accomplish. Don’t let some of the difficulties of life get in your way.

If you’re anything like I am on this historic day in the United States, you’re probably sitting frenetically on the edge of your seat, looking for exit polls and waiting impatiently for the first election results to roll in. I know I’m certainly there – I’m such a big politics hound that the presidential race is just one of many, many things I’m following today. Today’s events are a big distraction right now for me, for you, and for millions and millions of other people on both sides of political discourse.

While it’s great that so many people are engaged in the future of this country, it’s also a gigantic distraction. A good chunk of America isn’t really working today – and that means many millions of hours of lost productivity – and lost opportunity.

Take me, for example. Even though I have a deep, passionate interest in this election, I also know I have several projects I need to be working on right now and, even though I’d rather be following the news, I know I need to keep my nose to the grindstone.

Today is a great day to get ahead of the “competition” because so many people are focused on other things.

Here are seven great tactics for focusing on the task at hand, useful today and any other day when distractions abound.

Clear a workspace. If you’re in an environment where things are chaotic and you have no real clear place to focus on your work, it’ll be very hard to focus. Your mind will find ways to distract itself using whatever is at hand.

The best way to combat this kind of distraction is to clear your work area of distractions. Move all of the things that aren’t related to the task at hand far away from the space where you intend to work.

Cut off external communications. Communications devices are another form of distraction. That includes cell phones, the internet, your landline phone – even your office door. Close your web browser. Shut down your email program. Turn off that cell phone. Unplug your landline phone. Close your office door and stick up a “do not disturb” sign.

Even better – put a little blank piece of paper on your desk, along with a pen. If you’re in the middle of a task and something important pops into your mind, jot it down on that piece of paper and keep on going. You can deal with the contents of that note later.

Set a clear goal. Come up with something realistic that you can actually accomplish in the time you have. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. In fact, you’re often better off picking two or three smaller pieces instead, then working through those one at a time.

What if you’re just facing one singular gigantic project that you won’t get done today no matter what? Identify some smaller elements within that big project that you can complete today. Writing a book? Make it your goal to add 1,500 words today. Find that little piece you can do and set it as a clear goal.

Visualize what you need to get done. Once you know your goal, visualize the steps you’ll need to work through in order to get it done. What will you do first? What follows that? Jot it down – it helps you to make your plan clear. Just a bit of visualization up front can help you quite a bit when executing your task.

Plan for breaks every ninety minutes to two hours – but don’t interrupt “flow.” Regular breaks to re-fuel with food, drink, and a bathroom break are essential – without them, you can quickly lose mental acuity. Plus, these breaks allow you to catch up on any important news you might be following.

Of course, if you’ve managed to slip into a “flow” state – when you get deeply engrossed in a project and lose all track of time – don’t interrupt that flow state just to take a break. Instead, ride that wave for as long as it lasts and then break when you’ve lost that focus. The time you spend in a “flow” state is invaluable – don’t break it because of something arbitrary.

Use a timer. I find it quite useful to use an online timer to help me with scheduling regular breaks and managing my time throughout the day. I often use the “countdown” mode and set it at two hours. Sometimes it can go off and I barely notice it – I just quickly turn it off and keep going. But if I’m not really focused, this alarm tells me just when to go take a break, reload with a nutritious snack, catch up on the news, and so on.

Have a small (reasonable) reward at the end of the day. My reward is usually pretty straightforward. If I meet my work goals for the day, I allow myself fifteen minutes or so to meditate, followed by thirty minutes in a quiet room where I either read or play a strategy game on my Nintendo DS. It’s a very simple reward that doesn’t cost me anything, but the thought of that peaceful time really helps me keep focus throughout the day.

Without such a reward, I find it very easy to let down my guard during the day – and when I do that, I find myself browsing political news and wondering where all the time has gone, lamenting the things that I should have done.

Good luck!