So you work 40 hours a week. Oh 45 or 50, I mean. Oh, yeah. And you're getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night and eating a healthy, balanced diet of whole foods. And you're getting in three strength training sessions and five 30 minute cardio sessions a week, and maintaining a lively, active social calendar and finding time to live in the moment. And oh, of course, you're running a successful side hustle to eventually be able to leave your full time job to have more financial freedom and schedule flexibility right? Right. Look, you're probably here because you have a full time job or a part time job that feels like a full time job, and you're just trying to find time in your life to do all the things you want to do and all the things that people are telling you you should do. And I have some really bad news for you. You are never going to be able to fit it all in in a sustainable way. In this video, we are going to talk about prioritizing time for the actually important things in your life so that you can do the things that are actually meaningful to you with your time, rather than the things that aren't. This is the process that I have used and refined several times over the last four years of having a full time job and then running a business on the side, and I hope that this can be helpful to you. The first thing I'd recommend doing is doing a time analysis for one week. Basically, this is keeping track of everything you did that week in 30 minute increments. Now, why 30 minute increments? I found that in an hour you can do multiple things, so it's not accurate enough. And then if you go down to 15 minute increments, it's much more precise. But it's really hard to keep track of what you did every 15 minutes the entire week. And so a really nice sweet spot is about 30 minutes. I've tried both a paper version of this and a digital version of it. Either one is great, whichever one you prefer. Now it's really important to keep up with this throughout the week. I recommend twice a day. I found for me it works well to do it once around midday. Keep up with your morning and then once before bedtime to get through the rest of the day. So here's what last week two looked like for me. Now, why is this important? Well, we can't measure what we don't know. And so we need to to measure this, keep track of this first before we can make any real changes and discover how much time do we actually have around work to be able to do the things we want to do? The next step in this process is taking this raw data and breaking it down into categories. So this could look different for you than it does for me. For me personally, I broke things down into work, personal sleep, and health. And then I break them down further within those categories to get more specific based on my own needs. So here's the Google Sheet. I used to log all of the data from the calendar. I broke each of these categories down quite a bit based on what I actually did. So we can see here that I spent 43.5 hours working 59.5 hours on personal stuff, 59.5 hours sleeping or trying to sleep, and then 5.5 hours dedicated to fitness. Okay, so now we know where we're at. We looked at where we're at now. We need to look at where we're going, what we want to be doing with our time. So the first thing I would do is make a list of the things you want to do. And this is kind of a dream list. Things you want to learn, the areas of your life you want to grow in. The relationships you want to invest in. The side hustle you want to start, whatever it is. This is not someone else's list. This is not stuff you feel like you should do because someone told you to. This is the stuff that you personally want to do. Take some time and do that. No judgment. This is the dream list. We'll refine it here, but just spend some time making your dream list. Okay, now for the tough part. Now we need to realize that we're not gonna be able to do everything on that list. We knew that coming into this. We knew it was going to happen. We can't do everything right now. Now, that doesn't mean we won't be able to do them in the future if they're still important to us. But right now, we need to take those most important things and choose to prioritize those. My general philosophy is to do a few things really well, rather than doing many things poorly. And believe me, I have spent much of my life doing many things poorly. It's not fun. So now I would go ahead and pick 3 to 4 total things from your list. Now comes one of my favorite parts and that is creating your ideal week. So the first thing I do I would block in the time. The things you can't change. And that specifically right now is work. The next thing block off your sleep. You need your sleep. Life won't be fun if you don't get your 7 to 9 hours of recommended sleep. So now we have some chunks of time available. Likely you have some chunks in the morning, some chunks in the evening. Now go ahead and take those 3 to 4 priorities that you set up earlier and start filling them in. Tuesday mornings for that yoga class, and Saturday afternoon for getting together with friends. And I will caution you, the time goes really quickly. The other thing is, make sure you're building in buffer time because, you know, it takes time to to cook food to get ready to shower, to wind down at the end of the night. So make sure to leave some buffer time. This is always the hardest part for me. It feels like the time just disappears and it's like where did that schedule go? One tool to help with this is just simplifying your goals to a smaller chunk. So one example of this is my goal to work out of the gym six days a week. As I'm blocking things in my ideal week. I've noticed that it's really hard to fit that many sessions in, but it looks like I can probably do 3 to 4 sessions in a week really consistently and really successfully. So instead of work out at the gym six days a week, I'm just modifying that goal to say, hey, I can work out at the gym 3 to 4 days a week really consistently. And just like that, I can actually make meaningful progress towards a goal. Another tool I found very helpful is combining two activities into a single time slot. So for example, one of my goals is to spend 30 minutes outside every day. And another one of my goals is to spend intentional time with Abby, my partner, every day. What if we go for a 30 minute walk in the evening together after work? Well, that combines both of those things into a single time slot, saving me time and allowing me to make progress towards both of those objectives. So now you have your ideal week listed. Now the reality is there are other things in your life that'll get in the way. So put those obligations in there and work around them. If it’s something you don't want to be doing and you'd rather be doing something else instead, In some way, Find that off ramp for it so that you can start actually doing something that aligns with the current you. Because this might have made sense when you started it six months ago, a year ago, or whatever, but it might not make sense right now, and that's okay. Just find your off ramp. Don't like hard quit on it unless it's something that has that option, but find your off ramp and then be able to move in to what that ideal week is for you. You will not get this right the first time. The first time you set up your ideal week, it's going to be like, I'm gonna do this and this and this, and then you run into the reality of the week and things are going to change. They're going to get mixed up. And that's just part of the process. And so keep refining this for as many weeks as it takes to kind of dial in a really good week, a week that you enjoy the process of. A week that feels sustainable to you, a week that's just like I did it. I feel really great about my week. Here are a few practices that I found very helpful in transitioning this from an ideal week on paper into the real world. Number one, always plan your next week and then sketch in the week following. I have started planning my next week like locking things in for sure. On Friday at 5 p.m. at the end of my workday. I used to do this on Sunday night. Over the weekend, people would text me about, hey, can we get together next week for coffee? Hey, can we get this meeting on the calendar? And I often kept having to go, hold on, let me check my calendar. I'll get back to you on Sunday. Once a night, once. I'm building it out. So I've started doing so on Friday night so that once someone texts me, I can just go. Yes. No. Here's the time and just kind of make that process more efficient. The second thing is actually treat those priorities like commitments, like meetings on your calendar. So if someone asks you are you available at this time for whatever? In most cases, no you're not because you have that priority already and most people are really open to hey, I'm already booked at ten. Can we do 11:30? Type of thing. Now there will always be exceptions to this. That's part of life. But in general, prioritize yourself. Prioritize this part. It's important to you. So act like it. The next thing is be flexible within reason. So your week will not always be perfect, right? An ideal week isn't that every Wednesday, exactly at this time, I always do this. It's most weeks at this time I do this, and if something is at that time, well then I move the thing to somewhere else and I do it in another time. And maybe I missed a week. That's part of life. The key is making sure that you're prioritizing your life, not letting someone else prioritize life for you. The fourth thing is, you will get off track. Don't delay in getting back on track, so there will just be weeks. You can't do it. Great. Next week, pick it up, right? Once you get off the train, get back on it. That's where most habits fall apart is when things get hard, when weeks get difficult, right? Then you're just like, well, first it went a week without working out, and now it's been three years since I worked out like no, get back on it the next week. Just because this week wasn't perfect doesn't mean next week can't be a better week. A week that's on track. I remember the first time I did this process. It was one of the most eye opening things I'd ever done. And so I still come back to this and do it again. I'll look at how I'm spending my week, and then I will reprioritize my my ideal week and one thing I've noticed is that my idea week has changed over time. It's not the same, just like we aren't the same. And that is perfectly okay. It's just part of the process of growing and continuing to grow as a person. Now, if this video has been helpful to you, stop what you're doing right now. Don't go on to the next video and actually take action on this. Because the only thing that you can get out of self-improvement videos besides, just like, oh, I know I should do this, is actually stopping and doing it because there's no such thing as the perfect time, But right now is probably the best time.