Saving Time

I'm going to lobby Congress for a 27-hour day. That will give me just about enough time to get everything done….maybe. Seriously though, we all wish we had more time. Since none of us can get more of it than we've already got, we need to find ways to spend it more wisely. We're talking about saving time. I'm not going to cover techniques that will help you to cram more stuff into your already overheated life so you can act superhuman. I think that's overrated anyway. These are ideas that will show you how to do what you're doing now, only faster and more efficiently.

1. Figure Out Where Your Time Is Going

In their book More Time for Sex, Harriet Schecter and Vicki T. Gibbs provide a great starting point for making sense of where our time is going. They suggest making an "ideal" weekly time log of your life. This is what your average week would look like hour by hour if you were in total control. Here is where you write in the amount of time you'd like to be spending on your work, your kids, your partner, your hobbies, interests and yourself. Then you compare it to your actual weekly time log. This way you can figure out which parts of your life are getting the shortest shrift, and which parts are taking up more time than you wish. After all, if you're going to save a little time each week, you'd like to put it to best use.

As far as I can tell, there are only a few basic ways to save time, but they have lots of applications. Let's explore them:

2. Do It Faster

Lose the perfectionism.

I believe firmly that everything worth doing is not worth doing well: Short memos, e-mail messages, cleaning the toilet and making the bed are all excellent examples. Ask yourself how important the task is before you invest a lot of time and energy in it.

Get help.

At home, make sure that everyone who lives there pitches in. At work, find opportunities to help out your coworkers so they will help you when you need it.

Look for an alternative way to do the task.

If you do a task repeatedly, make sure you're working with the right tools. Working with stubborn, inadequate or outdated equipment is a sure way to waste hours of your time, whether you're working on the computer or the sewing machine. Good tools aren't the only faster way to accomplish a task - each situation is different. Most shopping, for instance, can be done more quickly through mail order. Going to the ATM is faster than standing in line at the bank. Grocery shopping at odd hours is faster than shopping at peak hours. Be creative and think of some alternatives.

3. Do it less

This doesn't really make the task go faster, but you spend less cumulative time on it, so it all works out the same. Does that report really need to go to your boss every week? Find out if it can be done once a month. How often do you vacuum? See if you can let things go a little longer. If your time log shows that you're watching 15 hours of television a week, you know you can do a lot less of it!

4. Don't Do It

Pay someone else to do it.

Sending out dry cleaning, for instance, is faster than ironing. Most household chores lend themselves nicely to this, whether you pay your own kids, the kid down the street or a housecleaning company. Being a bit of a tightwad, I balk at doing this myself, but you should consider it if you are unusually time-poor; for instance, if you have a new baby or work 80 hours a week.

Delegate.

This works if you have kids, a compliant partner, or if you manage people at work. A task should be delegated to the lowest-skilled person who can handle it, which frees the time of higher skilled people to work on more complicated things. This is especially true at work, so delegate wisely.

Stop doing it all together.

You stop doing something when you examine the task and realize that the results are not worth the effort. In the corporate world, this is popularly known as reengineering. If you've been laboriously typing up the same weekly report, and you realize that nobody is reading it, you stop doing it. At home, this is known as simplifying your life. If your volunteer work with the local charity makes you feel drained and irritable, you stop doing it.

Learn to say no.

Sometimes you can't fit it into your life, or you just don't want to. If you have trouble in this department, there are whole books and seminars out there just waiting to help you.

5. Do Multiple Things At Once

OK, I admit that this borders a bit on the "superhuman" theme. It also requires that you be a good multitasker. But there are at least a few areas where it's easy to do multiple things at once. It's easy to make double or triple batches of tonight's dinner and freeze them. It's easy to go to Radio Shack and buy a 25-foot phone cord so you can do something else while talking (or go whole hog and get the cordless phone.) It's easy to do some filing while you wait on hold with the airline.

My colleague, Danelle McDermott, has a great concept she calls "linking tasks". The idea is to pick a task you don't get around to often enough, and pair it with something else you do often and effortlessly. Every time I go to the laundromat, I bring the bills and pay them. Every time you watch TV, you could get into the habit of folding laundry or walking on the treadmill. Do you walk for exercise? Bring the dry cleaning and the mail with you. Do you often wait in the car for your kids to get done with soccer practice or ballet lessons? Keep all those magazines and clippings you mean to read in the car, and actually read them.

6. Plan Ahead

This saves a lot of time in multiple trips, unplanned "emergencies" and so on. It also allows you to find little five-minute chunks of time in your schedule. For instance, call ahead if you're running a special errand - if I only had a nickel for every time the store was out of stock! Keep a little list of these chores in your time planner: people to call, errands to run, etc. Make sure the list includes the relevant phone numbers, part numbers, sizes and other information that will make it possible to do this task on the fly.