What would an extra 5 hours do to your week?  In mine, it would be a productivity windfall!

Learn how I used the recent time change to move towards an earlier morning routine.

This is what my average morning looked like.  And when I had finally hauled myself out of bed, I hit the ground running and don’t seem to stop till I fall back into that welcoming bed.  No matter how you cut it, I am not one of Nature’s early birds.

If ever there was one thing on my perpetual wish list it was TIME.  Isn’t that every time-strapped parent / executive / student / small business owner’s secret wish?  Even just 30 extra minutes each morning to just catch a head start would be a boon.  Like 70% of the parents out there I am great at burning both ends of the candle, but all my previous efforts to get into Early Morning Time Zone just as a gift to myself had failed miserably.

“Bootstrap your time”

That was the phrase from a webinar that has been spinning in my brain recently.  It was part of the recent 2015 GWALS summit, and the speaker was Melissa Lanz.

Melissa is founder of The Fresh 20 – an industry leader in online meal plans educating families how to reduce their consumption of processed food.  

The presentation was ‘Simple Ideas Make Money.  How to leverage what you know to generate revenue.‘  I wanted to know more for myself, for my clients, and for my readers.  And I was hanging onto every rich and valuable suggestion.

Towards the end of the presentation, she said something that sounded so – well – wrong.

“And you can do this with something you already have – TIME.”

Wait.  Did she just say that?  Surely, she is not talking about me?  I have trouble finding an uninterrupted 2 hours to pull together a regular blog post.  Surely all humans are alloted the same 24 hours in each day.  Could I do this?  Since when could 24+1=24?  By the very laws of physics, if I add to the start of the day, I will have robbed it from somewhere else?  An hour less sleep?  An hour less productivity at night? Could I use her suggestion to find more time?  After all, if Time is the new Money, then this could just be the payout from this particular webinar!

Time Hack: the clocks went back

Timing is everything!  If you live in North America or Europe, most countries returned to Standard Time recently.  So I took advantage to create a time hack.  I made a pact with myself NOT to take advantage of that extra hour of sleeping in. I decided to rely on the fact that my circadian rhythm would wake me up at its regular time and filtered that through my week.

“Win the Morning, win the Day” Tim Ferriss, 4-hour workweek

I focused on the conventional wisdom that morning hours are considered more productive that people focus on higher priority tasks.  I have had a much more productive week.

What I did differently

I made a plan on how to use this valuable time (that I had bought and paid for with a simple sacrifice and habit changing).

• I set my alarm clock an hour earlier
• I honored my pact with myself and did not hit snooze
• I got an app called Fabulous which uses science to help you create a routine and I coded in a simple 2 step Morning ritual: Drink a glass of water when I wake, 8 minute Stretch.
• I treated myself to Tony Robbins’ 10-minute priming routine each morning (0:54-2:12).  “Emotion is created by motion. The way you move determines the way you feel. I have this deal with myself called ‘priming.’ It’s ten minutes, I put music on, I do this massive change in my breathing and then I do this 3-step process,” said Robbins.

1. 3-minutes of gratitude to think about 2 things I am really grateful for
2. 3-minute prayer for my family and friends
3. 3-minute process of the top 3 things I want to accomplish today

• I actioned some great prioritization tools such as the Eisenhower Box learned from learned via James Clear
• I focused on strategy vs triage.  ie I dedicated time each morning to a task that held meaning for me first, instead of my normal pattern of clearing the decks of all the debris before being able to dedicate a tired ‘chunk of time’ to that same task.  This made me feel good, a feeling that rippled through the rest of my day and increased my productivity.

All the gurus

The idea that such a finite item as time could become elastic – hum, never considered it from that angle before.

We are constantly told that time-saving is a ‘Super Power’.  Don’t know about you, but I am constantly attracted to, and bombarded with interesting articles from morning-types with titles like “Save just 1 minute a day” or “7 Ways to Get the Most out of Your Day“.  And the first thing they say is ‘Get up earlier’.  Yes.  I punish myself too – and lose valuable time trolling the internet for one idea after another in the hunt for more time!   It was never that I did not understand the concept or even that I didn’t buy into it!  
 But most other systems had just not worked for me – yet.  So if this is not the hack that works for you or speaks to you at this point of your life, keep hunting!

What happens the first time it fails?

Don’t break the chain!

Ok.  So I am human.  It is going to happen one day!  In my coaching, I use a technique which I call the Exit Strategy.  I work with my clients to consider what they will do at the end – before they even start their new project or land that job.  How do you want this to end?  It probably comes from my IT background, and using decision trees.  We all usually plan for success, but do we plan for failure?  Well, I have.  I hope not to – Fail that is.  I aim to keep the links on my Seinfeld productivity chain connected but should it break, I will just start the following day anew.  I have made a plan for success and a plan to get back on the horse in case of failure.  Every new morning is a new start and a fresh 24 hours!

You can stretch time too!

Here I am, almost a week later saying ‘I did it!’  It worked!  And if you are a time-strapped night owl like me, this is probably the best time of year to try the same thing too.   It may be not all of an hour at first, but once you see the benefits in your own busy life, you may be making the same choice I do each morning before NOT hitting snooze.

You could argue that it is any one of the other techniques that has made the difference, but none would have been possible without first finding that one extra hour in my day.  Most amazingly, I am actually awake and alert before my alarm goes off.

Would you like more productivity tips and time hacks?

Vote with your fingertips:

• Leave me a comment at the end of this article if I added information or value to your day
• I like solving obtuse problems.  Please email me suggestions for future articles
• Sign up to follow my blog theKarenaArena.com.  I cover topics that can add time back into your day and life, either through career conversations and planning, or through money and technology ideas that can help a busy business owner or entrepreneur retrieve a minute for their own sanity.  Having been the busy small business owner who filled every empty job function on the org chart while being a full-time mom, it is my passion to deliver on that ideal.

Finally, if you did succeed in adding any time to your busy day through any of the tips or links mentioned in this post (or others), please consider sharing how you did it in a comment before reaching for your next coffee!  For together we can achieve so much more than we can alone. and the best ideas can come from anywhere!

‘}…{‘

Over to you:

} .. What could you do with an extra hour in your day?  Would you compose or write or draw?  Would you start a parallel small business idea?  Would you job hunt?  Would you be able to read to your children at night?

} .. Had you ever considered time to be elastic?  If you could stretch time, would you use it to get more done at work or in your personal life?

} .. Is time an alternate currency?  How do you ‘spend’ time?

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INSPIRATION AND RESEARCH MATERIAL FOR THIS BLOG:

• GWALS 2015 – presenters and summaries
• Thank you Melissa Lanz (the Fresh 20) for the concept of expanding something as finite a time
• Daylight Savings Time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
• www.lifehacks.org
• jamesclear.com/blog
• Fabulous – a science based habit and routine building-app on the google play store
• Thank you to Lisa Bloom The Story Coach for the link to the Tony Robbins 10 minute priming.  More on Lisa – who was a GWAL presenter – in an upcoming  post
• Tony Robbins 10 minute priming.
• Thank you to Sam Horn The Intrigue Expert for her book Confused People Don’t Say Yes
• Kevin Daum – 7 ways to gain the most value from your time, Inc.com http://www.inc.com/kevin-daum/7-ways-to-gain-the-most-value-from-your-time.html
• Other information & links worth reading that I found while googling images for an alarm clock:
  • 6 reasons to start your day before 6 am
  • http://personalexcellence.co/blog/why-i-wake-up-early/
  • http://mindfulminutes.com/morning-routines/ – includes podcasts for Tony Robbins’ and Hal Elrod’s morning routines
  • 10 Essential Hacks for Time Management
  • etc etc