2 Powerful Ways To Save More Time

You barely have enough time to read this. Believe me, I barely have enough time to write it.

So let’s make the most of our time.

I have come to think of time in terms of outcome: I always ask myself, “A week or month from now, what would I like to say I did with this next hour?” That’s how, for example, I forced myself to write this email right now. I have a small lull in my day, and I could cruise Instagram or read the news. But I would rather say, “My newsletter is out!”

It’s a small way that I (ahem) build for tomorrow. If we aren’t mindful of our time now, we have nothing to show for it later.

You know who else thinks this way? Bethenny Frankel.

She has two tips that’ll make you rethink your day.

Most people know Bethenny as a creature of television — that no-BS woman from Real Housewives of New York City who spun out a brand called Skinnygirl and is seemingly everywhere all the time (including, right now, on what I admit is a very enjoyable reality show on HBO MAX). How does she do it? She says it’s simple:

“Managing your time is the whole thing,” Bethenny told me, in a cover story I wrote for Entrepreneur.

Bethenny runs a giant company with a small operation. She negotiates multi-million-dollar deals and edits her own blog posts. In a way, she says, she prefers being stretched for time. It forces her to be efficient.

(This, by the way, is very much the core of Parkinson’s Law, which is so true it’ll make you laugh. The short of it: Work expands to fit the time allowed. Need to finish something tomorrow? You’ll get it done. Have a deadline two weeks from now? It’ll take that long.)

I asked Bethenny how she packs the most into her days, and she said she follows two rules:

1. The Rule of Stacks

Bethenny does not like to set up for things. Settle into a podcast studio, do hair and makeup, travel somewhere, whatever — all of this is wasted time! It’s the time you spend in order to spend more time. That is crazy.

When Bethenny does have to do one of these things, she stacks them. If she’s in the podcast studio, she’ll record multiple podcasts. If she’s in hair and makeup, she’s going to do everything that requires hair and makeup, like go on TV and be interviewed and whatever else.

“More stuff gets jammed into a more efficient, shorter period of time,” she says. “I’m a stacker. I feel that people should stack.”

Ask yourself: What inefficiencies could you eliminate by stacking? What are you setting up and breaking down multiple times a week, that you could do only once a week instead? This stuff adds up!

It makes me think about all the times I’m interviewed on podcasts, which I currently scatter throughout my week. This means I must build in buffer time, set up my mic, adjust the settings on my computer, and so on. Maybe that only takes me 10 minutes — but if I’m doing it three times a week, that’s 30 minutes lost. Two hours a month lost! 24 hours a year lost! That’s literally an entire damn day per year just setting up my stupid mic! Ack!

2. The Rule of Buckets

How do you decide what’s worth your time? Bethenny has what she calls “the bucket theory.”

“You have six buckets full where your time has a greater ROI, versus 12 buckets that are half full,” she says.

In other words: Every opportunity is a bucket, and you can technically have unlimited buckets — but you do not have unlimited water to fill those buckets with. So do you want to fill lots of buckets part of the way, or just pick the most important buckets and fill those to the top?

“It’s very hard to learn which are the right buckets, because we don’t look at the big picture,” she told me. “We think about ‘That sounds good. Oh, and that’s fun.’ Then all of a sudden your time is being ripped away. And when you back away from the equation, you say, ‘Wait a second. I’m spending so much time on that thing and I’m not even making any money off that — and I don’t even like that as much as the other thing I’m doing.’ ”

Ask yourself: Are you filling buckets that aren’t rewarding enough? And if you got rid of that bucket, would your other buckets benefit? That’s a hard question to answer — because it might mean getting rid of some buckets. But think of it this way: If that bucket isn’t helping you build for tomorrow, then it’s just stealing your time today.

Want to live like ancient royalty? You can! To help us appreciate the lives with have, and to shake off all the negativity that often surrounds us, I investigated all the things that used to be available only to kings and queens… but that we all can do right now.

Want to know more? Listen to the latest episode of Build For Tomorrow!

That's all for now! You're awesome!