We spend our workdays in constant pursuit of focus. We invest in courses, test out the latest distraction-eliminating tools, and try various productivity strategies—all with the hope of maximizing our time. But when it comes to our personal time, it seems that we’re perfectly fine with letting it go to waste.
To fix this, you don’t need to overhaul your time completely. You simply need to make it easier to do what you want to be doing. Here are four simple steps to achieve this.
- Pick an activity you wish you did more of. Maybe it’s reading books, talking walks, or doing yoga.
- Pick an activity you feel you do too much of.
- Now, ask yourself how you could restrict the second activity. For instance, if you want to cut back on obsessively checking the news, you could restrict yourself to reading a small handful of sites once in the morning. If you make this a habit, you’ll eventually lose the instinct to keep refreshing the news all evening.
- Ask yourself how you might inject the activity you’d like to do more into the time you’ve taken back.
When you purposefully restrict the activities that provide your life with little value, the activities that actually restore you become easier to do. And you’ll finally get the most out of your limited free time.