Have you ever felt like there is not enough time in the world for you to cover your daily tasks?
There are just so many things in mind and on your plate. Well, time saving hacks are the solution!
Juggling between all the routine can add up to your stressful mind. Sometimes you get too tired and ended up becoming more unproductive. It can be frustrating especially when you face some bad days from the start of your early mornings.
Without realizing many of us are wasting precious time when we do a certain activity inefficiently or in the wrong timing. We can actually utilize every minute wisely if we build a certain multi-tasking habit in our daily activities.
Therefore, we have prepared the list of time saving hacks that can save you more hours to do something that you like!
1. Place Your Alarm Clock Far From Your Bed but Near Your Doorstep
Are you someone who often snooze your morning alarm clock? If you do, sometimes you may end up being late for work or any morning appointments. This is definitely a time waster habit without realizing.
Snoozing means delaying. It shows how much priority you put on the morning routine you choose to snooze. Quit snoozing, you save more time and kick off the habit of delaying.
To solve this problem, place your alarm clock furthest away from your bed and nearest to your doorstep. Choose the most annoying and loudest ringtone.
This enables you to be hardworking enough to wake up, to get out of bed. The annoying sound to your ears will force yourself to get up on time to off the annoying alarm sound.
2. Brush Your Teeth While Waiting For Your Face Mask or Hair Mask to Sip In
As we all have a weekly or alternate day routine to do our masking for either our face or hair. It usually takes 10-15 minutes leave on time before we wash them off.
We can utilize that time to brush our teeth while waiting. Waiting in the toilet, not doing anything is such a waste of time. In this way, you unknowingly killed some time while brushing your teeth which soon will turn into a time saving hacks.
3. Use a 3 in 1 Shampoo for Face, Body and Hair to Save time
A 3 in 1 soap which is a do-it-all cleanser for all your body parts is not only the best way to save shower time, it also saves toilet spacing. Being a minimalist, this is definitely a must-have in your bathroom.
Instead of separating your wash off time between hair shampoo and body bath, this all-in-one soap is going to save your showering time daily. You can also avoid confusion when choosing which soap is for your hair and body.
4. While Drying Your Hair, You Can Read Some Informative News or Emails
Blow dry time for your wet hair can take up to 10 to 30 minutes depending on your hair length and thickness. The longer and thicker your hair, the longer it takes to blow dry your wet hair.
This time-consuming daily routine could be done hand in hand with useful tasks like reading important news, informative articles online and work emails via your smart phone. Instead of doing it while lazing on a sofa, multitask this simple act while blowing dry your wet hair.
Cut down on checking your phone on a lazy chair, many times we can actually multitask phone activities while doing some mandatory routine.
5. Reduce Number of Clothes in Wardrobe to Save Choosing Time
This problem of choosing what to wear before you head out can sometimes consume up to an hour. Picking the right outfit to go out while modelling yourself a few times in front of the mirror consumes lots of time without you realizing.
The root cause may come from your wide range of choices of clothes in your wardrobe. The more choices you have, the more you get confused.
If given less choices, our decision will be made faster. This concept is similar to food menu. Many of us takes a longer time to choose a food in a restaurant with a long lists of food menu.
6. Buy Clothes That are Made of Wrinkle-Resistant Fabric
If you are someone who hates ironing clothes and rather wear wrinkly clothing than ironing them, avoid getting cotton fabric clothing. The more 100% cotton the clothes are, it usually ends up the most wrinkled among the other types of fabric.
Some recommendation for wrinkle-free fabrics are heavier denim material, polyester, wool, knits, nylon, and Lycra. These materials are optimum for traveling as we pack and fold them in the luggage bag, they still look good when taken out to wear.
The reason these fabrics are resistant to wrinkles is because they do not absorb water easily. This made them more stable and wrinkle resistant.
7. Sort Your Clothes According to Categories to Make Choices More Efficiently
Having a tidy and neat wardrobe is not only eye-pleasing but it actually saves much daily time in accumulation equals a lot of time. Many of us are unaware how much extra time, we took and wasted to pick clothes before we head out.
Sorting your clothes according to occasions, events and colors could made your daily choice not a hassle anymore. You just need to be consistent in making it tidy each time you done your laundry.
Getting this minor daily task organized would not add extra stress that could be avoided if we had done things right at the first time.
8. While Warming Up Your Car, Do Your Laundry Outside
Killing two birds with one stone? This term when used for time management means utilizing your time multi-tasking activities which could be done simultaneously. Time saving hacks!
While getting ready your car for a journey, some of us are habitual to warm up the car before beginning the ride. Have you ever thought? You can actually hang your laundry in your outdoor area of your house which is your mandatory routine.
Remember to utilize your environment and surroundings wisely. When placed in a place, we have many things undone to be done without realizing.
9. Being an Early Bird!
Do you know how much time savings an early bird had saved on a daily basis as compared to a late riser? Firstly, a late rise could waste half a day for waking up late and also its detrimental to their health especially their kidney and liver as they also do not sleep on time.
Being productive by waking up early is another time saving hacks to avoid morning traffic.
As compared to late risers, they would waste up to 2 hours and up to 4 hours the journey for to and from their office on a daily basis.
Early risers would not waste much time on the road as it would only take them 10-15 minutes to reach their office or home after work as off-peak traffic will not take up so much of your travelling time up.
10. Grab Morning Coffee Right After Starting Up Your Work Laptop
Have you ever noticed that when you just start up your laptop, you have about 5-7 minutes of buffer time for all your software running to pop out and to be ready for use?
While waiting for your laptop start up time, you can grab your morning coffee instead of sitting and waiting for your laptop to be ready. Use the waiting time wisely to grab your breakfast or morning coffee to boost a productive day at work.
A good breakfast or coffee is really a good way to start your day as your mood will be good with more energy levels.
11. Timing to Order Food for Lunch Matters
Do you know how much time wasted when ordering our lunch during the peak lunch hours? Approximately many of us could waste 30 minutes to 1 hour while waiting for our lunch to be prepared.
A recommended solution would be ordering your lunch at the golden hour from 11am to latest at 11.45am. This golden hour timing is where restaurants have less orders and the lunch orders have yet to be started.
As most restaurants generally opens at 10am, 11am onwards is the best timing to start ordering your lunch.
You will save so much waiting time while the kitchen is preparing your meal and via food delivery, the drivers are also less busy during the golden timing from 11am till 11.45am.
12. Order to Eat Indoor Instead of Cooking
Do you ever realize cooking takes a lot of time. You need to remember to consider 3 types of activities when deciding to cook. 1st is the preparation time; 2nd is the cooking process and lastly the dreadful cleaning chore.
This can sometimes waste you up to 1 hour. You can avoid all this trouble and mess, instead why not just order your food from a restaurant via delivery?
You can do something else more productive while waiting for your food order to come. With a delivery take out, you save cooking time, travelling time, parking time and cleaning time.
The cleanup for a take-out is fast as packed food provides disposable cutleries. Make sure to dispose them to the recyclable dustbin to go green at the same time.
13. Choose Your Lunch Buddy Wisely
When hanging out with a bunch of colleagues during office lunch hours, be careful in choosing the right people. As this group will determine your daily hacks on lunch time savings if you continue investing time with them.
Choose a punctual gang, avoid picky eaters and if possible, choose colleagues who bring positive vibes and energy.
Having able to choose a lunch buddy who could improvise your lunch time into productive conversations meaning having meaningful topics to talk (avoid the gossip gang).
Make every second count, talk to people with good vibes and productive topics which could bring value to life. Do not drain your energy with toxic colleagues.
14. Eating Light and Healthy During Lunch Hour Makes You More Productive
Many of us usually feel sleepy after our lunch break especially if our mode of working is just in the cold air-conditioner office. This happens if we consume lunch high in calories and usually a heavy and high in fat content meal.
This sleepiness we get after a heavy meal causes unproductive hours to us. As our oxygen and blood are so focused in digesting the meal we just had, we become sleepy easily after it.
To avoid this, we should always opt for healthy and light meals especially if we are office workers and not doing labor work. We will sit and continue working; thus we do not need many calories as an office worker.
Many office workers develop a bulging tummy and feel sleepy as they enter the office working world. The culture of having heavy lunches continues and we unknowingly felt so unproductive after lunch instead of being more productive.
Caffeine fix is just a temporary fix but not a good long term healthy solution.
15. Scroll Your Social Media When You Go to the Toilet to Limit Unproductive Screen Time
At this era, many of us are addicted and glued to our smartphones without realizing how much unproductive time we had spent on our phones.
An example of it is scrolling social media with no potential benefits to our mental health status.
Sometimes what we see on others, might make us feel lesser than others.
That might not be the reality but many of us, believe what we see in social media. Comparing ourselves to others too much is not good for our mental health. Thus, we should reduce screen time on social media if our career had no relation to this field.
We can cultivate the habit of checking out our social media only during our toilet breaks.
As we do not spend too much time in the toilet, we can multitask during this routine.
This way we could limit our social media for 15 minutes each time and not exceeding a wasteful amount to do other more productive activities.
16. Using Your Earphones at Work
Sometimes at work if we happen to sit beside a work colleague who is talkative and likes to ask you for help extensively, it might disturb our work’s efficiency.
One method to avoid these kinds of disturbances, is using earphones while working. When doing so, try to make it visible to your work colleagues that you are currently unavailable for chat and prefers to focus on your current job.
Once you set a habit and culture in this way, your noisy colleague will not disturb you anymore.
You can then work efficiently and reduce unproductive chatters during working hours.
When listening to music, it also helps increase concentration to your mindset, thus increases work efficiency and focus.
17. Have Dinner or Do Your Groceries in The Mall Near Your Workplace Nearby to Kill Traffic Jam time
Imagine being stuck at a 2 hours traffic jam after work, while you should have done something more productive with it. Many of us wasted time while travelling to and from our workplace back to our home.
Some useful suggestions would be having dinner somewhere around the corner of your current workplace which you should know best. Instead of being on the road tired and hungry, why not grab a relaxing dinner to fill up your tummy.
You can also get your groceries while waiting to kill time for the heavy traffic. Sometimes, when it is raining the traffic is even worse, you should always plan your chores wisely in all this circumstances.
18. Watch TV during Dinner Time Can Save Some Unproductive Hours of Binge-Watching
Watching Netflix or You tube especially if its not news or documentary related which do not contribute to useful knowledge in our lives can be a waste of time.
Thus, we can watch those drama and comedies during our mealtimes.
Multi-tasking some activities like watching TV during our mealtimes could saved up our time like killing two birds with one stone.
To avoid dragging on to another episode of a drama on TV, with fixing our mealtime we are within controlled time span. This can assist us in staying efficient and hacks to saving throughout our time.
19. Wash Dirty Plates Last During Your Dishwashing Routine
There is this little time saving hacks of placing the oiliest and dirtiest plate below the rest of the cleaner ones above. This can save time because when washing the first few plates, the water and soap that flowed down will wash a layer of dirt at the same time.
This will make it easier when you reach the last few plates below, the dirt and oil would be much lesser. As, they were already drenched with the many times of water, soap and bubbles from the earlier plates.
An oily dirty plate can take really longer time to wash, so while you wash the cleaner ones above let the remains do the job when the excess water and soap flows below.
20. Always Remember to Grab Your Thrash While Heading out
Instead of purposely heading out to throw your rubbish, you can always save a trip and some time while you head out.
This task could be done several times a day when u head our to pick your delivery or before you drive out somewhere. You can always think of what tasks can be done at the same time and cultivate this time saving habit hacks.
21. “Maintain Connection” While Driving Out With The Car’s Bluetooth Loudspeaker
Keeping in touch with your loved ones is part of life. We can always have a catch-up call with them in a safe manner while driving.
This can be done, by utilizing the smartphones loudspeaker functionality or car Bluetooth to easily have a call while driving with your loved ones. This method enables you to multitask while driving and staying in touch with your family and friends safely.
22. Learn to Say “NO” With No Guilt
Some of us may find it difficult to refuse when asked for help from a friend. This may cause us if excessively saying yes to all helps needed, making a mess for ourselves and even creating a new trouble in our lives.
Saying NO is an important habit for us to focus on our main tasks and activities for the day. We need to prioritize our tasks for the day before lending a helping hand to others.
Our productivity will be affected if we assist someone else’s work too much. Learning to say NO is a habit also according to how urgent the help is needed. Do not need to feel guilty as long as it is nothing to do with saving someone’s life.
23. Put Things Back Where it Belongs Every Day and Each Time
Many of us waste time in searching for an object we had misplaced. When we needed the thing, tends to be missing while when we do not need it, it appears.
The first step in avoiding this issue is, we should always put back the object where it belongs right after we finish using it. Be sure to always place and arrange all your items in an organized manner to easily find them when needed.
The few seconds we needed to just put back right where it belongs could avoid us wasting up to an hour of searching misplaced items. Especially during urgent times, this habit could help a lot to avoid this mess.
24. Unsubscribe From Junk Mail and Unwanted Emails
Everyday we see our smartphones having popped out email notifications which we swipe off. Our lazy habit to not clear unwanted mails could lead to accumulation of mails that crowd our mailbox.
One day when we are looking for an important or urgent email, it would take up much time searching in between the crowded inboxes. This is going to be a time consuming and messy process.
Thus, the first step is doing it right from the roots of the cause. Hit that unsubscribe button from the sender once and for all. You then do not need to receive these spammy junk mails anymore. You can now read and see only important mails appearing in your inbox with peace of mind.
25. Allocate a Daily 15 Minutes of Decluttering
Decluttering just 15 minutes a day is a beneficial habit which could save so much of our time. It can be your working files in your laptop.
It also can be as simple as arranging your work desk or arranging items in your living hall.
The more you declutter, the lesser the mess as it will not be an accumulated pile of mess.
Things could be easily found, it eases your mess, reduces unwanted stressful trouble and saves so much of time.
26. Stop Aiming for Perfection
Many people who suffer from perfectionism are too keen to every tiny detail that they had wasted time on unimportant details that do not bring value.
In many things we do every day, sometimes we need to exclude unimportant details to finish our tasks efficiently as long as we get the main elements done and checked. We should not find fault on little elements which do not add value.
We could use the extra time to tackle more important tasks, instead of wasting time of small details which do not help in finishing a task for the day. Aiming for perfection is not only adding unwanted pressure and stress, but it also wastes a lot of time too.
27. Avoid Trying to Please Everyone
One thing to note when we carry out a task or manage an event that involves many parties, is we cannot please or satisfy everyone’s needs or wants.
Too many opinions and suggestions will not only confuse you but also waste your time in thinking and deciding. Thus, we need to stick to our own mindset on what is best for the current tasks or events.
We do not need to cater for everyone needs as this is an impossible task. We just need to do what is best for majority but not 100% of them. Stick to the main principle on what is best and just do it.
Quit the habit of being a people-pleaser, it is sad and never would work in reality.
28. Know Your Priorities
Getting to really know your priorities means putting what is important to you comes first. It may be your health, relationship, and career.
The 3 elements that will maintain a healthy physical and mental mindset is important to be taken care of to have a efficient you.
Stop wasting time on toxic food, toxic people, and toxic activities. Avoid junk food or fast food which do not contribute health benefits to your body in the long run.
Avoid hanging out with negative mindset people to avoid negative vibes to avoid arguments which could have been eliminated. Spend quality time with loved ones to maintain a good relationship.
Toxic activities like smoking and too much alcohol should also be eliminated to ensure a healthy body in and out. Replace these toxic hobbies with a healthy jog or run in a park with your partner.
29. Utilize Your Waiting Time to Gain Knowledge
We need to be practical to differentiate between resting time and waiting time. During a rest time means we sleep and really go into deep sleep to restore our body systems.
Waiting time means we can actually do something like reading business news or reading knowledge gaining books to expand our knowledge.
30. Focus on Getting Mentors Instead of Expanding Your Friendship
Try replacing Friends into Mentors during your young adulthood. At this stage of your life, it will the peak of learning as much for a successful career.
Thus, if you could be hanging out with a business mentor to bring out the potential of your entrepreneur dream, this would be the best steppingstone.
No matter at what age, we are we can always learn much from successful and rich business partners. Spend time with these mentors to make your social time out more meaningful towards your goal.
31. Deal with Small Tasks Immediately
Small tasks may seem unimportant, but it is still something to be done by the end of the day. When loaded with too much work, we might neglect and put small tasks to be the last on the checklist.
However, this is the wrong mindset, we should always finish small tasks first so that we do not drag the big tasks along to affect the timing allocated for small easy tasks.
We might waste too much time on big tasks and affect efficiency of small tasks. Our brain actually also feels more motivated if we could cancel out some easy tasks and more of them naturally. We then become more efficient and could end up saving more time by starting with small task hacks.
Bottom Line
We are all looking for many time saving hacks to make the most out of our precious time. As we grow older, we start to hold more responsibilities or roles to our loved ones and ourselves.
We have only 24 hours in a day. There are many ways all our little daily habits could affect us as an individual thus we should learn to be a good manager of ourselves first!
