‘there isn’t enough time in the day’

I hate the sayings ‘it’s such a small world’ and ‘there isn’t enough time in the day’. I also hate the fact that as I get on older these seem to become more true, more sensible analysis of what is going on.

Now that I have a website, some niche websites, a degree to study for and fun to have, I am finding it increasingly difficult to known when to do it all. I’m saying it like that, as I don’t want to say I am finding it difficult to actually do it all, I can do that easily, its when to do it so that everything fits into the day in an appropriate way.

Work Out Your Day

After all I am saying that I understand the ‘there isn’t enough time in a day’ more, I still hate the saying. As I like maths, I’m going to do a short example.

I have about 20 hours a week of lectures and tutorials. As I want to work out how much time we have in a day I will be averaging this out between each day in the week (assuming University is 7 days a week). So each day I have about 3 hours of University to attend to. Of course this doesn’t take into account the work which I should be doing outside of the lecture. The time spent studying outside the lecture is meant to be about 6-8 hours a week on each subject, I do 6 subjects. Now to me this seems like alot, so I will using the lower barrier of 6 hours.

6 x 6 = 36 hours and then divide that into a day would equal out at around 5 hours a day. So so far we have 8 hours taken up in a day, which is quite a lot, but isn’t too bad.

Planning The Day

Lets think about when this should be done. I normally prefer to do ‘not as fun’ work in the morning, as I am much more motivated at that point in the day. Say I wake up at 08:00 in the morning, taking an hour for having breakfast and getting ready, I would start work at 09:00, at around 13:00 I would have lunch, so this means 4 hours has already been done, starting again at 14:00 I would finish my University work at 18:00 in the evening. I would then have an evening meal and relax for a couple of hours, so starting again at 20:00 I would have about 3 hours to do all of my websites and my other projects, finishing at 23:00 so I could relax for another hour.

Longer Than We Thought!

Now when I have been working out these calculations it seems like a long day, more than I thought! But you have to remember this is an example, and the amount of days I would be doing that much work is probably a rarity, mainly due to the fact that work outside of lectures usually takes me half the amount of time it is meant to, don’t worry I’m doing it correctly! As well as this on all days excluding Monday, Wednesday, Friday (My post writing days) I don’t normally need that long to check through my emails and go around marketing my website, they are quite simple tasks – commenting – which means I usually get them done whilst eating my breakfast, lunch and dinner, meaning that three hour which I plan out for the websites isn’t always needed.

Despite this, even if I did use the above example every day, then it shows that I can actually do everything on time and efficiently, If I stuck to the plan and kept my eye on all the things going on around me.

So my advice for anyone using the ‘there isn’t enough time in the day’ saying, is to sit down, work out how long everything should be taking you, if it isn’t as long as you thought, try a bit harder, if you actually haven’t got enough time, maybe you shouldn’t be doing all the tasks? Focus on the important ones, and once you have become more efficient in those, add the smaller, less important tasks back in.

Time is always available!