“How to Find More Time in the New Year”
By: Justin Waggoner, Ph.D., Beef Systems Specialist
One of the more common New Year’s resolutions is to find more time for family, friends, exercise or some new activity. However, the question becomes, how can we find more time within the day or week for the aforementioned activity of choice. One of the ways that many people try to find more time (including myself) is the “do I really need that much sleep” method of finding more time. Although, this method does work; it may also result in some undesirable outcomes, especially if the activity involves interacting with others. Time management experts suggest that the best way to make more time for any new activity is to become more efficient within our day. Efficiency is essentially organizing and prioritizing the daily “to do list” but it also includes looking for places in our day where we simply waste time. The most common “time waster” for many people involves a computer or a phone in today’s world. Procrastination is also another common “time waster” that reduces our ability to get things done. Many strategies have been developed to combat procrastination. One simple strategy that I recently came across is the two-minute rule and it essentially targets all those little things that we encounter during the day that eventually add up. This informal rule essentially says that when we encounter anything in our day that will take less than two-minutes that we should do it, be it a quick email response or cleaning up our computer files. It is difficult to find more time in our busy work schedules, but one thing is clear seconds turn into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into days and so forth, which proves that little things do add up over time.
For more information, contact Justin Waggoner at jwaggon@ksu.edu.
