Free Time

I have all kinds of free time laying around over here, and thought I would share some with you. I won't give you MINE, because that's the thing about time, if I spend too much of my own time with you, it means there won't be as much free time. Right?

But I'll show you how to get your own.

Decide

One of the most powerful free time finders in the world is the ability to decide. "Oh, I don't know what the right course of action is" are the words that lead to you losing hours (weeks, months, years). If you could make a decision quickly, accepting that sometimes it will be the wrong decision, you'll get back free time.

Say No

People say yes to far too many things. We fill our calendars up like there's a sale at a chocolate shop, and then wonder why we feel so full up. I schedule my days to 40% tops. Tuesday this week? Zero items on the calendar. I ended up having four meetings, but my schedule was wide open at the start of the day, and all the meetings felt breezy and wonderful. Say no. Stop volunteering to everything and pick a few things. Don't sign your kid up to 100 activities. 3-5 will do.

Prepare

I'm not fashionable so take this with some discount. My clothes are set up on the rack such that shirts are on the left, pants are on the right. I have three "drawers" left to right for pants/shorts, tee shirts, and underpants. Everything I own more or less goes with everything else, so getting dressed is as fast as "grab one thing from the left, one thing from the right, and some underpants." Tah dah. Find ways to prep the time wasters in your day and free time will pile up.

Delegate

If you're a leader, train your team to lead. Let them make decisions (with your guidance the first few times). Grow their skills til they can run the group themselves. Your job is to take strategic information and move it to tactical execution, but that doesn't mean that you can't train your team to anticipate and execute based on previous situations. We rarely produce things from whole cloth, as they say. It's usually a gentle repetition with new creativity sprinkled in.

Be Concise

We chew up so much time in communications. Meetings, ugh. An hour long meeting is often scheduled for an hour because there's too much on the agenda to begin with. Figure out ways to make meetings less frequent and less long. Do "meeting before the meeting" status updates (thank you, Dan Carney). Make notes to bring to meetings. Try not to over-explain. Maybe have a "in the last episode" recap at the start, but not much more.

Time Comes From Love

You may have heard this before, but everything in life is either a choice based on fear or a choice based on love. Some fear is healthy. Healthy love is healthy. But a lot of times, we live in fear, whether we're willing to call it that. "Guilt" is an upstream feeling that boils down to fear. Think about it. You can't feel lovingly guilty.

Free time comes from love. It comes from choices that add up to loving yourself. Doing meaningful work is love. Doing work that will cause you pain if you don't do it (things like paying your bills) is love because if you get it over with, you can feel happy (which is love).

If you want more free time, figure out where the fear emotions are. It will always be a feeling that's "upstream" from the actual word fear, but it sure won't be something related to love. Make sense?

Now, go use that free time however you love to use it. It's sunny out today. I'm going to use some of my free time on a bench reading over my report from the CliftonStrengths report I did the other day.

Chris...