how to optimize time for goal achievement

What is time optimization?

I guess it’s a little obvious from the name of it. It’s optimizing your time, right? Getting the most results in a shorter time period. It is, yes, but then again, what are these results? Cleaning your house? Doing your homework? Responding to these emails? For me, this definition feels a little too general, since you can achieve all of this and still waste all your time by doing so. Personally, the way I perceive time optimization is dividing our time into our goals, projects, and responsibilities so each and every one of them can have time and space to develop. Does this mean you have to do them in a certain order and all of them every day? Not really, and that, in fact, is the key to getting results in time optimization.

What is our problem?

One time I heard Reggie Rivera say in a Ted Talk, “If you want to achieve a goal, don’t focus on them.” We as working people have a lot of tasks going throughout our days; writing emails to our bosses, doing our homework, developing projects, dealing with our families and friends, but also we want to work on our goals and dreams. For most people, there is this idea that we have in our minds about how our optimal life would look like once we achieve our goals. But for a big group, having the time and space for working on this is very difficult because of our life speed, and we try to force our goal development plan into our busy schedule, which turns out even worse than in the beginning because of the overwork we put on our shoulders, making us feel overwhelmed and we lose hope of ever achieving our goals.

But then how do we do it?

For this, we need to make a plan that fits personally into your own schedule. This plan consists of a list of steps you need to take for you to start your goal journey and later on, achieve it.

1. Set responsabilities and tasks

For us to create a plan, first, we need to identify what our life looks like. What do we do every single day? How does our schedule look right now? What do we need to do every single day that is not negotiable?

For simplicity, I’ll use myself as an example. From Monday to Friday, my schedule is kind of busy. In the very early morning, I have classes from 7 in the morning till 9 am. From then, I start my first job of the day working in a daycare until I get out at 1 pm. From then, I drive back home, have lunch, do some homework, maybe go to the gym, shower, and then at 5:30, I have to leave the house because I have my second job working as a cashier in a restaurant, which I usually end up at 11:30 pm, and Fridays I’m off at 2:00 am.

Try to write down all this information; if you’re a visual person like me, I recommend you do a table for all your activities of the week. Make sure to include colors, times, names, tags, and notes about the activity.

2. Identify short and long term goals

Now, this part is very important to differentiate between short and long-term. And no, short term doesn’t mean the goals that you can achieve in a couple of months. We mean short term to those tasks that can get you closer to your goal and occupy only a very short amount of time out of your schedule. Long term refers to bigger activities that might consume more time and that you’re not going to implement at the beginning of your goal planning journey. These are the kinds of opportunities you achieve over time once you get your schedule going and you progress in the short-term period.

For example, my all-time goal would be to make this blog my main source of income. For this, I need to set up a plan on how I’m going to do it at the same time that I have to deal with my responsibilities. For our goal achievement, we’re dividing my journey into a series of tasks that need to be done so that my goal is fulfilled, the short run and then the long run.

Short run can be tasks like: learn about how to monetize, generate content, upgrade our website, research some affiliate links, content strategy, etc. For the long run, it can be email marketing, development of digital products, ad revenues, backlinking, social media promotions, collaborations, etc.

For my long run, I chose activities and tasks that I cannot fulfill until I accomplish my short-term goals. Also, for the short run, don’t focus on them all at the same time; try one by one until you fulfill all of them. This way, not only will it motivate you to move forward on your goals, but it will also help you not feel overwhelmed and be completely focused on that one main task that will eventually make you succeed at it even faster.

3. Identify oportunity time periods

Now, you have two main components of your goal achievement plan: your schedule and your goals. What we need to do next is combine them in a way that feels right depending on your personal life and schedule. For that, try to look for those time periods that you may consider would be great opportunities for working on your goals. Again, what we don’t want is for us to feel overwhelmed with all of our day tasks only for us to add more to them. By looking for these opportunity times, keep in mind how physically and mentally you would feel by implementing these into your schedule.

Maybe you do have some time during your lunch break, but does that mean you should use it as an opportunity time? Not if you don’t feel like it. Maybe from Monday to Friday, you are very busy, but you have some time during the weekends, then just fill those times for working on your goals. The point is that we can use some of our time to do it by implementing this as part of our routine, and we don’t feel like it’s something that we “have” to do before the day ends.

4. Be aware of weaknesses

Like we’ve said before, making time for our personal journey is very hard for some people. There will be times when you might not set the right goal, the time opportunity periods are very small, you feel overwhelmed, or maybe it seems like you’re getting nowhere with your goals.

It is completely normal to feel like this during the process; trust me, I have been there as well. But the important thing is to focus on what you really want and how you want to grow in your personal or professional development. If your goal is something you truly desire and that inspires you to become the best version of yourself, the journey (still going to be hard) but it’s going to be worth it.

If you come across any problem while building this plan, there are a couple of things you should do to resolve it. The first thing would be to identify the problem and what part of the plan it would affect you, maybe they switch your schedules, or you didn’t fulfill this week’s time because you had externalities happening? Then it’s all good, this process is not just a one-time plan that you’re going to stick to the exact same way from when you start to when you achieve that goal. If your schedule changes, your times are not optimal, you change your mind about the goal you want to pursue, just change it and do it again it’s all okay.

5. Build systems: technology is fun!

Next is my favorite part, the automation of our system. All the steps that we talked about so far are going to be combined in this part. You’re going to let technology be your personal assistant that will tell you when you are free and when you are not. Personally, for this part, I use Notion since it’s an easy tool to use and you don’t need to know any type of programming to use it, but you can always use your preferred tool.

What you’re going to do is fill all this information into a table or a calendar, and this will need to tell you what days are you doing what, in what order, what are some opportunity times, what tasks are you going to work on that time, your process, and a tracker on that process.

This is what my table looks like