Hi friends, today, I’m going to offer a different perspective on prioritizing your hours

I’m pulling from my favorite book right now “You Have More Time Than You Think“. I’m going to guide you through 3 steps and give you my own examples so that you can follow along.

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Figure out your priorities

To prioritize your hours, you need to figure out what you want to prioritize in your life.. is it exercise? cooking more? relationship? Write down 3 things you want to prioritize in your life

Figure out where you’re spending your time

Start keeping a time journal – I logged what I did every 30 minutes for two weeks to get an idea of where I’m spending my time – you can go further and log every 15 minutes (Click here for the time sheet I used).

Categorize your time – Once you log your hours, you should be able to see what you’re spending a majority of your time doing – such as eating and drinking, shopping, socializing, cleaning, cooking, etc. As a reminder, this is just an exercise for you to get an idea of where you’re spending your time, it does not have to perfect!

Figure out how to spend your time

The best way to approach this is to reduce the things you dislike doing and increase the amount of time doing the things you love.

You have 168 hours in a week. With 8 hours of sleep, that makes it 112 hours in a week. If you REALLY think about it, that’s a lot of hours… Even with a 40 hour full-time job, you have 56 hours in the week to do watever you want. THAT’S A LOT OF HOURS. Do you feel like you’re using the 56 hours in the way that you want?

Here’s a personal example for you guys:

I used to spend about an hour a week grocery shopping. In the grand scheme of things, that doesn’t seem like a lot right? But, that was one hour going toward something I didn’t like that I could be putting towards something I did like. So I transitioned to getting my groceries delivered.

your money, like your time, is a choice.

I decided that it was worth it to me to spend the $10/month on an instacart membership to get my groceries shopped for and delivered to my door. To this day, I have saved over 56 hours of grocery shopping. And, I allot that time to actually cooking food because I REALLY enjoy it. Getting your groceries delivered seems like a luxury but I have actually saved more money doing this – because I order only exactly what I need. And if you shop at ALDI the prices are SO good that it’s worth it!

If you are finding that you are spending time on cleaning and not getting enough family time on the weekends – it’s time to look for a solution to decrease that time. Outsourcing cleaning is not a FAILURE! In the same way, if laundry is taking you hours and hours and not letting you spend time with your kids, there’s obviously an answer there as well! Like I said, your money is a choice. You can choose to pay for a cleaning service or pay for cable

We spend a majority of our days working to make money, the last thing you should do is come home and not be able to use your hours to prioritize the things you want in your life. Make the room in your budget to pay for the things that matter to you so that you can have the time that matters to you!

This is my challenge to you – when you are logging your hours and seeing that you are spending more time watching TV than doing things you love (like I did) now’s the time to reprioritize and assign some hours in the evening to the things that matter to you whether that’s a phone call with a friend, a workout, etc.

What do you think about this method of prioritizing your hours?

If you would like to read “You Have More Time Than You Think” – you can purchase it here.