168 hour assignment example

Time Management Worksheet: The 168 Hours Exercise

If you constantly feel like you don’t have enough time to achieve certain things in your life, then I think this exercise in time management is really the place to start.

A lot of people are very inaccurate when it comes to estimating how much time they have for activities. I bet if you asked a random group of people why they don’t learn a new language, someone will reply that they “don’t have time,” but this exercise might go to show you that you do, in fact, have time.

This exercise was really eye-opening for me, and so I created a free printable/downloadable worksheet that you can access and try this time management exercise yourself (see below).

The Premise

This exercise is based on the idea that we have 7 x 24 hours in a week, that is: 168 hours. Many of us don’t realize where our time actually goes, and for me, working this out actually helped see that I spend a lot more time doing things that aren’t adding value to my life than I had previously thought.

I’m including insight into my life, so as to give you an example of what this exercise can look like. If you check the estimated total of hours spent per week, you’ll find that I actually have quite a few hours left over…where does that time go?

[I suspect TikTok and Instagram and the like, whoops.]

Time Management: Now It’s Your Turn

I encourage you to try the exercise for yourself: sit down and work it out. Personally, I did it for the first time when I was rushing a sorority (that’s right, I was in a sorority), and it was revolutionary . It became immediately obvious that I was wasting so much more time than I had previously estimated, and it allowed me to make better use of my time.

FREE 168 HOURS DOWNLOADABLE WORKSHEET

In the folder, you’ll find:

• a PDF version (great as a printable)
• a Pages version for Mac users (with built in formulas that will automatically calculate your hours for you)
• a Word document (editable, but no formula so you have to calculate by hand)

I sincerely hope that this exercise benefits you as it does me, whenever I redo it for whatever stage of my life I’m in.

To access my downloadable desktop and phone wallpapers, head over and download them here .

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

4 Skills to Learn (or Train) in the New Year

Residency chronicles: buying a car, you may also like, six things to do the summer before medical..., applying to emergency medicine residency, 4 skills to learn (or train) in the..., free desktop wallpapers for january 2022, best medical tv shows | my favorites &..., the big day…, interview with pencl notes app developer: a fellow..., updated: usmle minis podcast: step 1 as an..., 2020: new beginnings goal tracker printable, please let me know what you thought of this blog post :) cancel reply.

• Med School Resources
• Tips for Students
• US Residency Match & USMLE
• Content Creator Tips
• Freebies (Downloadables, Printables)
• Language Learning

• 50 People Who Do
• 168H Spreadsheet

How to Take Control of Your Time With The 168H Spreadsheet

• April 15, 2020

Time management is extremely important. Everyday, we all get the same amount of a commodity that is invaluable and non expendable. No matter how late it is in the day when you wake up. No matter if you’re busy, procrastinating, or both. No matter if you’re rich, poor, educated, uneducated, motivated or unmotivated, lucky or unlucky. There is one commodity that is distributed to each and every one equally, every day. Time.

Time is the one commodity nobody can have more of. We are all allowed 24 hours in a day, and what we do with that time is up to us.

There is not any major incentive to spend your time in the smartest way possible unless you’re trying to achieve things in life. Time saving and/or spending is not directly rewarded in our society. A lot of people say that money can indeed buy more time. That is true in only a figurative sense.

• There is no interest rate on time, you can’t invest 5 hours to hope to get an extra 2 at the end of the day. Nobody has 26 hour days.
• You can’t pay for your groceries with time, wire transfer time to people, or write a check of 1 million hours to a business partner.
• You can’t get a time discount, a time cash back, or fly miles because you spent 5 hours doing something.

Yet time is extremely valuable, more than money. It is a finite resource for everyone, everyday. Nobody can take your time away from you, and you decide how you spend it.

I created a free tool to help you gain control over the way you spend your time. Let’s see how to use it and implement it in your everyday life.

#1 If you don’t have time, you don’t do things

“I don’t have time” is one of the most overrated, overused sentence in the world. People say it all the time to justify why they didn’t do the things they should have done or wanted to do. It’s like nobody has the time to do a favour to a friend, to check things off their bucket list, or to work on this project they should have started long ago.

Here is a more accurate explanation to not doing things is: “It’s not my priority at the moment”

You had plenty of time to do that one favour to your friend, or to start this project you wanted to start. You just didn’t consider those things as having a high enough priority to actually do them. You most likely simply decided to use your time to do other things.

But if you really did want to do those things, you would not only make them a priority, but also realise that you have plenty of time to work on them.

I remember when I was saying “I don’t have the time” all the… time. Deep inside I knew I had the time. I just didn’t prioritise it.

#2 Where is your time going?

The first step in claiming your time back and prioritising the use you make of it is to realise where your time is going. I created a tool just for that. It focuses on the time you spend doing things weekly .

Why weekly?

Because when trying to solve a problem, bigger samples of data give a clearer picture of the possible solutions. A week is 7 days, 168 hours. It makes it a lot easier to see patterns and blocks of time on a 168-hour timeline than on a 24-hour one.

This project has been greatly inspired by Laura Vanderkam’s book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think , which I highly recommend. Analysing my time use over the week has been a huge game changer for me, and the birth of a completely new way of doing things.

Getting started

First, you need to download a copy of the Joseph Mavericks 168 Hour Spreadsheet. Get it here:

Here is what the document looks like once you get access to it:

Once you get access to the document, there are two and only two areas you should edit: the green one, and the blue one.

The green area It is used to fill in the name of the activities you do. It is pre-filled with common activities everyone does, like sleeping, spending time in the bathroom, doing the groceries… If you have more specific activities that are not listed, feel free to add them in the empty green rows.

The blue area It is used to fill in the time you spend on each activity. You can choose to input the time Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. You can use decimals.

The white columns on the right of the table are only here for indicative purposes. You shouldn’t try to edit them.

You should only input one value per blue line. If you add more, an error message will show up in the Errors column.

Example If you estimate that you spend 3 hours per week doing groceries, you only need to fill in the blue Weekly column. If you spend 30 minutes per day in the shower, you only need to fill in the blue Daily column.

Problem: I have no idea how much time I spend doing things

This is a common problem. The choice between Daily, Weekly and Monthly estimate is here to help you cope with that. If that is not enough, the only way to get an accurate estimate is to log your time in a journal for a week or two. Then, input average values in the spreadsheet.

If there are some activities you only do on weekdays (like your job, or fetching the kids), simply input a x character in the “Weekdays Only” column, like so:

You’ll notice the numbers in the left white columns get updated accordingly.

Overall, if you don’t have a precise idea of how much time you spend doing something, it is better to over estimate than under estimate. If you think you spend 45 minutes a day commuting but it could be more, put one hour in the spreadsheet. The last thing you want is a false positive telling you you have more time than you thought while it is not the case.

#3 How much time do you actually have?

As you enter more and more values, you will see the graph on the right side of your screen update.

Once you’re done inputing your activities, you will be in either one those 2 situations:

1- You still have time left

That’s amazing! You didn’t even know it, but you actually still have time to do things!

2- You don’t have any time left

You have a very busy life, and very little time available to do things at the moment. Whether you actually are motivated to start working on your project(s) is out of the question, because you don’t have a minute for it in the state of things.

However, not all is doomed.

First, double check your data. Did you input everything correctly? Did you properly log your time in a journal for activities you’re not sure of?

Second, it’s time to optimise your time use. Look at each activity one by one. Once in a while, you will run into one that can either:

1- Take less time, or a lot less time

2- Be completely removed from your schedule

Up until now, everything is simple math. You are trying to get as big of a gap as possible between the total amount of time you spend doing things and the number 168. The rest will come later.

Here are common activities that can be optimised to help you spend less time on them, and as a result gain time over your 168-hour week.

• Groceries : do them online
• Cooking : meal prep your week
• Sleeping : sleeping in on weekends is overrated. It’s actually healthier to have a sleep routine that changes as little as possible.
• Bathroom time : make your routine more efficient by having an organized bathroom and making sure you don’t run out of the basic stuff (razors, shampoo, toothpaste…)
• Commuting : look into more efficient ways of commuting: electric scooter, biking…
• Combine activities : If you spend 2 hours per day reading but 1 of them is during your 1-hour daily commute, then these 2 activities “cancel each other”. The “reading” row in your spreadsheet should read 1, not 2 hours. You just saved 60 minutes of your time.
• Time spent at job : work remotely. We live in an ever-connected world, and more and more people work remotely while still being under contract with a 9–5 type employer. Talk to management at your work, and explain to them why you feel like this is a better option for you. Make sure you prepare your argumentation well, and that you will be able to maintain at least the same productivity level than at the office.

Here are common activities that you can easily spend 90% less time on, or completely remove them from your schedule:

• Online time wasters : Facebook, Instagram and other Snapchats are highly addictive time-wasting activities. They’re not easy to stop, but they are definitely worth stopping.
• Socialising : your relationships are the heaviest component of your life, choose them wisely. Afterwork fun and Saturday afternoon beer doesn’t have to happen if you have better things to do.
• Reading the news : most of the news outlets are never neutral and always biased, purposefully or not. When something big happens, you’ll hear about it if it’s important enough. There are many other options than the news to try to understand the world and what is happening around it (mainly books).
• TV : the same goes for TV, except it comes with even more unnecessary noise, filters, biases and a ton of useless content.

Optimising time is not an easy process. Bringing about change takes a long time. You won’t be able to incorporate online groceries, meal prep, less socialising and a more efficient bathroom routine all in the span of a week. Not to mention closing your Instagram account or stopping to tweet every 30 minutes.

Give it time, be patient. Slowly but surely, you will be able to bring down your total time spent doing these things.

#4 What to do with all this free time?

You should now have a sizeable gap between the top of your graph and the number 168:

The most relevant number to look at here is the time left per week. Don’t despair when you see you only have a mere hour per day left to work on exciting projects, when you would also like to relax once in a while. Look at the weekly time left: 7 hours is plenty to both relax and work! We’ll call this your weekly spare time.

A- The more time you have, the less you do

• Some people hop from one project to another because they can’t commit to one, and it’s their own way of procrastinating.
• Some people do it because they honestly want to do everything at the same time. Except that is mathematically not possible.

It is always better to focus on maximum 3 activities to dedicate your weekly spare time to. Here’s why:

• The human brain is not designed to multitask. Even if you have a true will to try and do everything at the same time, you will most likely fail. Our brains are much better at focusing on one or a few tasks at a time rather than trying to execute 10 at the same time.
• You will handicap yourself. If you have too many projects to work on, you won’t know where to start and how to organize your time. Both because you will be overwhelmed, and because there will be too many possibilities. Keep it simple, limit yourself.
• You will make very slow (if any) progress. There is no point in splitting 5 hours of free time per week into more than 3 activities. Beyond that number, you will have just a bit more than 1 hour and a half per week on each activity.

With that in mind, here are recommendations if you have:

• More than 10 hours left per week: pick 3 activities to focus your weekly spare time on.
• 5 to 10 hours left: pick 2 activities
• Less than 5 hours left: pick 1 and only 1

You don’t have to split the time equally between each activity, but you just can’t do everything.

As an example, here is what my list of “things I want to do with all this free time” used to look like:

• Sign up for a social club
• Get better at chess
• Learn Chinese signs
• Learn a third language
• Start blogging 
• Train for marathon
• Bike at least 25km per weekend
• Tinker with electronics

Bear in mind I had nearly 20 hours of free time per week. That would be 2 hours per activity. Not bad, but it is also important to be realistic when it comes to being able to keep up. At the time I wanted to run a marathon, train for swimming, and biking on the weekend. I might as well have dedicated my free time to Triathlon training.

On top of virtually training for a triathlon, I wanted to learn to play chess better, tinker with electronics, learn Chinese signs, and blog, to name a few. This was clearly not manageable. I had to prioritise.

B- How to prioritise

You can skip this whole part if you already know what your top 3 activities are going to be. If you’re still unsure how to prioritise and choose your working projects, read on.

Your Ultimate Prioritisation Cornerstones.

Your Ultimate Prioritisation Corner Stones are things that you want and will highly prioritise in your life. They have really high value to yourself, and come before a lot of things on your priority list.

The best way to choose your Ultimate Prioritisation Corner Stones when you have a lot of options (like me) is to think a lot about each one. The best way to do this is to write your thoughts.

Here is what I wrote down about each of my options.

• Swim : I do want to improve my swimming, but I’m a bit late in the season and most swimming clubs don’t accept newcomers anymore. Besides, I live by the sea and can go swim there. Maybe swimming classes can wait.
• Volunteer : I really want to try to volunteer. I have been saying it for so long and I’m finally in a situation where I can do it. I have researched the existing organisations, I am ready. This is definitely important for me.
• Sign up for a social club : I want to meet more people and get out of my comfort zone when it comes to social interactions. This is the activity that is the most likely to go over the scheduled time, because social outings and gatherings always take longer than expected.
• Play better chess : I want to get better at chess, but I don’t think it’s a priority to the point of dedicating so much time to it. I can play once in a while on the iPad.
• Draw: I always draw once in a while anyway, I feel like keeping it up, but I don’t feel like prioritising it over other things. 
• Learn Chinese signs : I just love the visual memory challenges. I have this app on my phone I can use when I have a bit of time, while commuting for instance. It shouldn’t be a top priority.
• Learn a third language : this requires a big commitment and I’m not sure I’m ready for it yet.
• Blogging : I have been blogging on and off for a while, I really feel like I finally want to give it a real shot. I want to commit to it, plan my content, research interesting thins to write about, interact with an audience… I have slowly but surely built the base for this, both in terms of technicality and motivation. I feel like I need to start taking it more seriously.
• Train for a marathon : this is on my life todo. I need to do it, and I’m in a situation where I can afford to spend time on it. I just have to go out the door and run in the park nearby. I can’t see any reason to not prioritise this. It takes a descent amount of time, I’m motivated about it, and if I succeed I will check something off my life todo.
• Bike at least 25km per weekend: I bike most weekends, and I don’t feel like I should pressure myself in doing it every weekend, especially if I’m going to train for a marathon next to this. I should take it as it comes with the biking.
• Tinker with Arduino: I love electronics and have always played with them in my spare time when I feel like it. No big project to prioritise here either.

There’s no secret here, some options have to go away and some will stay. You can also rank each one of them with a score out of 10, and only keep the 3 best ranked ones.

After all my writing, I realised the 3 things I was going to prioritise were:

1- Volunteer

2- Train for Marathon

C- Leave a buffer for the unexpected

It’s always better to leave a few hours of buffer every week, for the unexpected. The best way to do that for me was to completely remove online time wasters from my agenda, and replace them with that buffer.

Do 10% of what you wish you could do

Another thing I did is to use 10% of the unexpected buffer for the things I wish I could do more of. Once in a while, I will still play chess, learn Chinese signs, or tinker with electronics. Those things still make me happy, even though they’re not a priority.

#5 Time put in perspective

Throughout my own learning process of tracking my time use and optimising it, I researched and compiled the most revealing facts about time management. I always get back to them when I need to feel the motivation to use my time wisely, and to keep my upward momentum.

Monthly activities amount to little time when looked at on the weekly scale

When I started volunteering, I realised it was taking me from 10am to 4pm on Saturdays. In the beginning, I thought this was a huge amount of time. But I was only doing it once per month, twice tops. Once I put it in my updated 168-hour spreadsheet, I realised this:

• 6 hours per month only amounts to 1.5 hours each week
• 12 hours only amounts to 3 hours per week

I could definitely afford that, especially for something I wanted to prioritise and that was helpful to others!

Daily time adds up very quickly on the weekly scale

One hour of wasted time per day shaves 7 hours off your week! That’s huge, and this was a perfect reason for me to stop watching Youtube.

On the other hand, if you manage to save for instance 90 minutes per day, but that’s 10 hours and 30 mins per week!

The most meaningful things are the ones we spend the least time on.

Take a look at the vertical graph. It automatically sorts your activities from most consuming to least consuming. For most people, over 50% of the time is spent sleeping and working at the office.

All the things that bring you joy, the things you wish you could do more of, probably somewhere much further down.

In this article, we looked at ways to try and make more time in your weekly schedule. They can enable you to do more of what you love:

But one the biggest game changers when it comes to time use is still either:

1- Finding a financially viable alternative to the 9–5. If you have another source of income, and if it enables you to live the life you want, you probably should quit. There’s no reason to stack up more money with a fixed salary if it makes you lose valuable time.

2- Having a more meaningful 9–5. When you truly love what you do, you’re a lot less pressured for time, because you’re already spending it in a fulfilling way.

Imagine if this big chunk of time at the top of your graph was used for something meaningful.

#6 Do more of what makes you happy

At the end of the day, it’s about investing as much time as possible in yourself. That is things that fulfil you and the ones you love: creativity, exercise, family, friends, teaching, learning, writing…

Not everybody is able to quit their 9–5 to find something more meaningful. Besides, even if your 9–5 is not a perfect match, it might still bring you a sense of satisfaction.

These days, the 9–5 lifestyle tends to be too easily categorised as negative. Unlike the common advice in the productivity and self-improvement spheres, you don’t have to quit right away and go do something bigger than yourself. You just have to bring more meaning to your life.

No matter what it is, you need to do more of what makes you happy. You only have one life, make sure you enjoy it.

Thanks a lot for reading! To start tracking your time right away, get the official 168h spreadsheet here:

If you liked this article, spread the word!

Subscribe to the newsletter.

Every Saturday I share: 1 quote I believe in My latest articles 1 book/article I enjoyed My life metrics

Other posts you might like

If You Want to Make Money on the Stock Market

20 Things I do Absolutely Everyday to Keep My Momentum Going

Ticktick or Todoist? The Ultimate 2023 Battle

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Easy as 1, 2, 3!

Simply enter your email below, and you’ll receive your 1-month Premium Trial for Ticktick right away! Enjoy!

2023 Update!

In 2023, I released an updated edition of the freebie you just downloaded. It contains 75 interviews, 200+ pages of content, over 100 book & tool references, as well as insights on how the pandemic reshuffled the cards for entrepreneurs!

Thanks so much for your email! I’ll reply as soon as I can, look forward to hear from me within a week!

Free Smart Goal Worksheet Template

Get your free 168-hour worksheet now.

Are you constantly strapped for time? Does it seem that there are never enough hours in the day to accomplish everything you want? Do you get stressed trying to find the time to complete all the tasks on your list? If so, you are not alone. For many people, this is a recurring problem that degrades their quality of life.

Time is the most precious commodity that we have been given . Why? Because once lost, it is gone forever. We cannot borrow or buy more of it at any price. Unlike many assets, time cannot be saved for some future use. It is a finite resource that is fleeting. We really do not know how much of it we will be afforded since the future is uncertain.

Think about this: what do Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Oprah Winfrey, the Dalai Lama, and all of us have in common? Each one of us has 24 hours in a day and not one second more. No amount of money, fame, influence, or power can change this fact. It is the one gift that all of us have been dealt evenly and fairly. Time is the ultimate level playing field.

Let's examine time more closely: since all of us have 24 hours in a day, that equates to 168 hours per week (24 hours x 7 days). Fortunately, when we divide 168 hours by 3, we get a round number of 56 hours. Why did I divide by 3? Because our time can basically be broken down into 3 basic categories that make sense for most of us: sleep, work, and everything else.

The Three 56-Hour Time Buckets

Think of each category as a separate bucket of time. We have our sleep bucket, our work bucket, and a bucket for everything else. Most adults require 8 hours of sleep per day. This means that we spend one-third of our time (56 hours per week) sleeping, or 1 bucket.

The second bucket is allocated to work. Since most of us work at least 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, this equates to 40 hours each week. The careers of many people often demand more than 40 hours each week and also have the added burden of commute time to and from the workplace. For simplicity's sake, let's assume that most people spend one-third of their time working and commuting to work, which is 56 hours per week, or 1 bucket.

This leaves us with 1 remaining bucket of time at our disposal for everything else. It is the time we use for everyday tasks such as preparing our food, eating meals, brushing our teeth, showering, grooming, choosing what to wear, cleaning the dishes, exercising, meditating, etc. This is also the bucket of time we draw upon for leisure activities such as reading, going for a hike, watching TV or a movie, spending time with our kids, and enjoying moments with our significant other. The time in our 'everything else' bucket also gets allocated for non-everyday and occasional, yet essential, tasks such as grocery shopping, doing laundry, cleaning the house, getting our car washed, or getting an oil change, etc.

Because time is a limited commodity, and it is best managed by allocating it into these 3 buckets, it becomes imperative that we make the allocation as effective and efficient as possible. How do we manage our 168 hours most effectively?

Deciding What’s Important

In order to determine which tasks and activities are worthy of our precious time and therefore have earned allocation to one of our buckets, we need to evaluate them. Before we can perform this evaluation correctly, we need to first determine our (1) core competencies, (2) values, (3) goals, and (4) sources of happiness.

1. Core Competencies

Our core competencies are our distinguishing abilities that make us stand out from the crowd. They are the skills that we have developed that enable us to achieve our goals. They are the talents that allow us to bring the most value to what we do.

Our values are a large part of what defines us as individuals. They help to guide our decisions, and allow us to know when we are on the right path. Our values also provide a solid foundation for our goals.

Our goals are the ambitions that we want to achieve in our life. They help to create a roadmap by which we travel, and work with our values to guide our decisions.  Our goals should not only be looked at as targets, but also as benchmarks.

4. Happiness

Our sources of happiness are extremely personal and individual. We should not take our cues from others when deciding what makes us really happy; rather we should look deep into ourselves to discover our real sources of happiness. Knowing what truly makes us happy will make it easier for us to stop spending time on tasks and activities that don’t serve this ultimate goal in our lives.

Managing the Time Buckets

Essentially the first bucket, the sleep bucket, is fixed. For the sake of our health, we should not take any hours from that first bucket to add to the other two. So that leaves us with two buckets, or 112 hours, that we need to focus our effort on.

Let's start with our work bucket. What are the competencies that we want to focus on and develop in our work life? Which skills are we best at? Which skills do we want to develop in order to help us reach our work goals? Which activities are most aligned with our values? And which ones actually make us happy? Any tasks that do not properly align with these criteria should be outsourced or delegated wherever possible.

In my own work as a creator of this blog, the activities which are most aligned with my four criteria (competencies, values, goals and happiness) are the ones that involve researching topics, writing articles, and interacting with my readers. These (among others) are tasks which consume the 56 hours of my weekly work bucket. Other tasks, such as website design, hosting, maintaining databases, do not meet my four criteria so I delegate and outsource them. This doesn't mean these tasks are any less important; it just means that they don't belong in my own work bucket, but in someone else's.

Next let's look at our 'everything else' bucket. In the very same way, we must evaluate the tasks that we perform on a regular basis that fall into this category and determine whether they meet our four criteria. Now, not everything in this bucket will always align with all four of our criteria. For example, I don't want ironing to be one of my core competencies, but looking well groomed is one of my goals, and I feel better and happier when I present a positive image. Grocery shopping, on the other hand, is for me actually a task that meets all four of my criteria and I would never consider delegating; I know many people who disagree and would happily take it out of their own buckets.

How Do You Spend Your Time?

The reality is that most of us have no idea how we are spending our limited time and what we are actually putting into our buckets. In order to determine if you are using your own buckets as effectively as possible, I recommend a simple exercise.

Spend the next week (and preferably the next two weeks) writing down everything that you do, in as much detail as possible. The more specific and detailed you are, the more value you will get from this exercise. Take note of how much time each task you perform is really taking. I guarantee that at the end of the first day you will be surprised, and by the end of the two weeks you will be astonished by how little you know about the way you are actually spending your most precious commodity.

This may seem like a daunting exercise to complete, but its value is enormous. To make it easier to accomplish, we have created a free worksheet for you that breaks down your week from Monday through Sunday into 15 minute intervals ( get your free 168-hour worksheet now ). The smaller the interval, the more accurate and, therefore, the more useful your data will be. In order to help you remember to fill out your worksheet regularly, set a timer to remind you to complete it every 15 or 30 minutes; if you don't fill it out at least that often, your data's accuracy will suffer.

Get Your FREE 168-Hour Worksheet and Guide. Fill Out the Form Below to Receive Your Worksheet Now.

Your Name (required)

Your Email (required)

Yes! Please send me my free 168-Hour Worksheet and Guide now.

After filling out your worksheets for at least one whole week (remember, two weeks is really preferable), add up the hours that you spent on each task as a total. Then use your four criteria (core competencies, goals, values and happiness) to evaluate each one of those tasks. At the end of the exercise you will very likely find that you are spending a lot less time than you would like on what is most important to you, and you are in fact wasting a lot of time on things which are meaningless to you. Now what do you do with this knowledge?

How to Use Your Time Buckets Effectively

1. Be Thoughtful and Realistic

Once you have completed your worksheets and determined which activities and tasks belong in your buckets, decide how much time you ideally want to devote to each one. Remember, each bucket only gets 56 hours in a week, so allocate your hours thoughtfully, but realistically. You may have to make some sacrifices in this step; determine what you are and are not willing to compromise on.

2. Eliminate Waste

Out of the tasks that are most meaningless, determine which ones you can either eliminate or reduce and how you will do it. Let's say for example that you have determined that you spend 4 hours a week waiting in lines. By doing your banking online instead of at the branch, by ordering your postage instead of going to the post office, or by shopping at the grocery store at off hours, you maybe be able to cut those 4 hours down to just one.

3. Block Off Time Slots

Now look at your most important and meaningful tasks. Are you dedicating enough of your limited hours to them? Let's say that spending time with your children is one of your highest priorities in your 'everything else' bucket. But after completing your exercise, you find out that you are actually spending a lot less time than you want to with them. Make it a point to block off time slots on a weekly (and hopefully daily) basis that you will dedicate to them. By blocking off that time, you prevent other less meaningful tasks from encroaching on what really matters to you. Do the same with your work bucket. Those activities that are most aligned with your four criteria and which are not getting the time they deserve, also need to have dedicated time blocks.

4. Plan Ahead

Remember those occasional, yet essential tasks I mentioned earlier? Sometimes those tasks can really require you to make some drastic changes in your schedule. For example, tax season, holidays, weddings, etc. can’t be ignored, and will take up a very large amount of time which has to come from somewhere else. Plan ahead for these occasions so that you are well prepared and create as little disruption as possible for your most important daily tasks.

5. Prepare for the Unexpected

And finally here is one really useful tip. Every day you will unexpectedly find yourself in an unavoidable situation that encroaches upon your precious time. Maybe one of your coworkers is late to start a meeting, or maybe you have an unusually long wait at the doctor's office. Instead of letting these occasions take up extra space in one of your buckets, come up with a mental list of small, yet meaningful, tasks that you can complete during short unblocked intervals. Create a list of friends and relatives that you would like to email, or bookmark articles that you want to read on your phone's browser. That way you will never be caught off-guard and you will be able to turn time wasted into time well-spent.

If you found this useful please share it.

168 hours each week. Track and enjoy each hour

Time management can truly make an immediate difference in your life.

Table of contents

How was created the 168 hours, the basic principles of the 168 hours, applying the 168 hours principles, benefits of using 168 hours.

168 hours is the amount of time that we’ve got in a week. The method of planning with this name is a practical and inspiring guide that helps us make the most of it. Once we become aware of the amount of time we have, we can much easier to examine our weekly allotment and thus find time for all the things we want to accomplish.

168 hours is a simple and efficient way to juggle the time we have at our disposal so we can live the life we want.

We don't build the lives we want by saving time, We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.

168 hours is a concept of Laura Vanderkam . She is the author of several time management and productivity books, including Juliet’s School of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. She is the host of the podcast Before Breakfast and the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and five children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

In 2010 she published the book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think in which she shows us that "with a little reorganization and prioritizing, we can dedicate more time to the things we want to do without having to make sacrifices."

You know you have 168 hours every week, but how do you spend them? The answer to this question is what helps you find out what your flaws are in time management so you can take appropriate action. To find the answer you need to keep track of your time in short intervals. Then, analyze how you spent your time and make the necessary adjustments.

Also, it’s recommended to dream big and give your goals a timeline, then start breaking these goals down into doable steps. After that, plan your tasks and hold yourself accountable to make sure that you are making progress towards your big dreams.

In applying this time management method, several strategies help us achieve the desired results.

• Start tracking your time is one of the most important things you have to do. Less important is the way you do it, it can be on paper, computer or phone. It is important to track your time in short intervals of 15 or 30 minutes. Use PlanArty Time Management Solution to keep accurate records of your activities
• Do this for a week which means 168 hours
• Classify activities by categories that interest you and calculate how much time you spend on each. You can do this in PlanArty using Planned day versus Real day
• Analyze the results and mark the unwanted differences
• Plan the next week in advance taking into account the desired changes.
• Follow the schedule and, where necessary, adjust it on the fly

The greatest benefit of applying the 168 hours is like Laura Vanderkam says "Spend more time on the things that matter, and less on the things that don’t."

Time tracking helps you to be more aware of where the hours go. Therefore, your plans will become better and better. You will also make better choices regarding how you choose to respect what you have planned. Overall, your Work / Life balance will improve remarkably.

© 2024 Plan Arty | email: [email protected]

time tracking | activity tracking | timekeeper

• Using Global Human Resources

Examples of Calculating Hours-Based Seniority

In this example, you're an HR specialist configuring the enterprise seniority date at the person level. You are defining an hours-based seniority rule to calculate a worker's length of service. Here's how the hour conversion is defined:

8 hours in a day and 40 hours in a week

173.33 hours in a month (hours in a year divided by 12)

2080 hours in a year and 52 weeks in a year

Let's see how to calculate the length of service for a worker Maya Singh using the hours-based seniority rule. Maya is an hourly employee and her work hours are entered in the seniority hours table (PER_SENIORITY_HOURS) every week.

Maya is hired in the Vision IND legal employer on 1-Jan-2007.

Seniority at the End of a Week

Applying the rule, Maya has a seniority of 40 hours for the week ending 7-Jan-2007.

Here's how the seniority is calculated:

Seniority at the End of 6 Months

Maya has a seniority of 1080 hours after 6 months as of 7-Jul-2007.

Seniority at the End of 1 Year 6 Months

Maya has a seniority of 3160 hours after 1 year and 6 months as of 7-Jul-2008.