After bringing home my son from the hospital, I quickly learned just how much time and willpower it takes to raise children. Specifically, I realized just how much free time I had before he was born. This got me thinking about how much free time I still had, despite devoting the majority of my day to him.

Thus, my little yellow schedule was born.

I took a sheet of yellow notepad paper and broke out my daily schedule into quarter hour blocks. I then allocated my daily chores and how long they should take on this schedule. Bottle prepping, bath time, food time, getting dressed for work, working out; if I took time out of my day to do it then it went on the list.

I quickly realized something. I had a ton of free time floating around haphazardly on this list; I just never noticed! I spent basically all day taking care of my son yet this list was telling me I had more than an adequate amount of time to do what I wanted to do.

So I fixed it. I noticed that my chores had little reasoning behind when they were done, so I grouped up different tasks at different times of the day when it made sense. I realized that I spent the majority of my afternoons screwing around watching television and scrolling through nonsense on my phone, so I started waking up and going to bed two hours earlier to take that time away from myself. I made sure every quarter hour had a specific task assigned to it.

I cannot tell you how life changing this one simple list was for me. The mornings with my son have never gone smoother since all of his morning routine was prepped by me before he even woke up. Night time is much more focused on family time since I have less of it to waste on my phone. I started writing again with my new time in the morning.

Planning for What is Important

Years ago I never thought I would honestly say I wake up at 4am to write on a blog and set up my day for success. I do not expect everyone to make radical changes to their schedule like this, but the point is there is time in your schedule if you make room for it. I could have certainly not woken up earlier and instead spent time in the evenings doing what I do in the morning.

But I knew myself better than that; I have a bad habit of losing track of time when I have distractions all around me. When you are up early in the mornings, the only thing that can distract you is yourself. I made it a priority to myself to spend more time writing, so I made sure I had the time to do it when nothing could stop me.

Take a sheet of paper, or a spreadsheet, or even your some sticky notes, whatever works for you. Write out your day in quarter hours. My list starts at 4 and goes all the way to 8 with four lines for each hour.

Now map out your typical day with approximately how long each task takes you. The point of this exercise is to be honest with yourself. No one is looking over your shoulder or judging you.

Are there any gaps in your schedule? Are any tasks on your list taking longer than they realistically should? Have you come to the conclusion there is not any ryhme or reason to your day to day schedule?

My biggest spot for improvement was in the evenings. I would work out until roughly six and then until ten all I had scheduled was dinner, feeding the baby, and bath. Obviously there was family time built into this, but I knew it was not taking me four hours to do all that, and I knew I was not spending all the extra time playing with baby. I was on my phone doing nothing productive.

What can you do differently? Maybe you lie in bed for half an hour after the alarm and rush for the rest of your morning. Maybe you are like me and spend your entire evening loafing around. Maybe you are actually constantly busy and feel a little insulted that I am even saying you have free time.

Making Time

If you just cannot get up in the mornings, move your alarm across the room; you’ll sleep better without it next to you anyway. My phone now sits a few feet out of arms reach so I am not tempted to use it while lying down, and I am also forced to stand up to turn it off. I know in the back of my head that if I ignore the alarm and it wakes up baby or my wife, I will have a very bad day. This makes for excellent motivation, fortunately.

If you spend your evenings on the couch, maybe do what I did or rearrange your living room to suit a different goal. For instance, if you have a goal to play an instrument more, then move it into the living room. If you are wanting to write or paint, put your tool of choice where you typically sit. Setting up constant visual cues like this will help to remind you of your goals all without any extra mental effort.

If you are too busy to even think about any of this, try to group up your chores if possible instead of spreading them out. We used to have a bad habit of splitting chores up hours or even days apart. Our biggest issue was with laundry; there is no need to wash laundry one day and throw it on the floor to fold and put them away the next day. Chaining relevant tasks together like that will help keep you organized and take one extra thing off your todo list.

Another problem I have noticed is that I spend too much time thinking. I suffer from crippling over analysis constantly. So instead of having to remember my routine constantly and waste time running in circles, I wrote myself sticky notes and put them in places I would see them. I wrote out a schedule for myself (see above) and took a picture so I always had it on me. Maybe I go overboard on the planning, but it works for me. You have to do what works for you in order to get the job done.

If using your phone or a calendar on your email to send you reminders throughout the day will keep you on track, then why not use it? The less time you spend thinking about what needs to be done, the more time you can spend getting it done. If it is something done once, think it through and do it right. If it is done repeatedly, spend the time to think it through the first time and then write down the process. Reinventing the wheel constantly is a waste of time and productivity.

Tiny changes can lead to huge results. An extra half hour built into your schedule could be the difference between reaching your personal goals and blaming lack of time. At the end of the day we all have twenty four hours; rich or poor, successful or failure, happy or sad, we all have the same time to get stuff done. So make your twenty four count.