How To Maximise Your Time

17/11/2016
Lewis Wedlock

Lewis is a dab-hand at juggling multiple projects and maximising his time. Let him show you how.

You can be more productive by doing less work.

You can be more productive by doing less work.

Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? The most successful people I know work a LOT less than people who work ten hours a day and conform to this #grind trend probably swarming your social media accounts. I like to sum up my attitude to work with this phrase: ‘It’s not how much you do, it’s how well you do it’.

As young adults, we are told constantly that in order to succeed we HAVE to work hard. Well this is true to some extent, we have to conceptualise ‘hard work’.

‘Hard work’ at its core is working consistently and productively towards a goal. There is no time limit associated with this concept, only a taken for granted idea that ‘hard work’ must equal ‘long work’.

It’s time to free your mind, reader.

It’s time to free your mind, reader.

The most successful year of my life I balanced four A-levels and a blog project. Revising four subjects is no easy task. Neither is developing and producing blog content. How did I achieve my A levels and produce content for a worldwide audience? I committed quality time to both projects and not forced time.

Quality time: committing to a project or endeavour a set amount of time per week and not exceeding this time.

Forced time: feeling obliged to work on something even though your head really isn’t in it.

By setting specific time frames to work on projects, you are ensuring your motivation and therefore productivity is concentrated and invested equally into your tasks. For example, I would revise each subject for two hours per week (it’s really not a lot of time when you consider you have 24 hours PER DAY) as well as setting two hours per week to work on developing blog content. The rest of my week was then dedicated to my down time.

A vital part of productivity is down time, believe it or not.

A vital part of productivity is down time, believe it or not. I have found that the times that I am most relaxed, the best ideas come to me and I am hungry to work again. Don’t get me wrong, if you are locked in your room hustling away to achieve your goals, good on you. BUT consider that you could commit to specified, allocated hours of work as well as enjoying that down time that you have earned and STILL be productive.

Society likes to put success in a box. It’s important to know that we are not all going to fit inside of this box. We cannot all commit 12 hours per week working on exam/coursework/deadlines/projects and expect to be successful. Sometimes we have to step outside of this box and explore options ourselves. The best decision I made was to stop forcing work and set times in which I could let productivity flow.

To summarise this article:

We can balance expectation and recreation.
We can be young at heart but mature in our approach to work, and this starts with investing quality time into our projects, not forced time.

I understand the pressure of feeling like we are not deserving of success. I understand that schools, colleges, even the workplace pressure us into working a certain way and persuade us to ‘keep to the rules’. We are not confined nor defined by these rules. We can have both a social life and productive work life.

So invest quality time, not forced time into your projects and you will immediately see the difference in not only your work, but your social life too.

This is by no means an all inclusive set of rules so let us know on Facebook or Twitter if you have any other tips on how to maximise your time.

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