Do you always feel like each day goes by too quickly for you, and you don’t ever achieve much?
Being productive requires planning, and to adequately maximize your short time, it is important to put in deliberate effort towards it.
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Below are eight-plus steps to maximizing your time that don’t flatter you, don’t promise transformation, and don’t pretend the world will suddenly cooperate. Some of these may irritate you. That’s a feature, not a bug.
- Admit that you don’t actually want to use your time “better”
Most people don’t want to maximize time. They want to feel less guilty about how they use it.
You say you want more time for “important things,” but when free time appears, you mysteriously scroll, snack, reorganize a drawer, or reread emails you already understood. This isn’t accidental. It’s avoidance dressed as leisure.
Maximizing time starts when you say out loud or privately, “I am choosing this because I don’t want to do the other thing.”
That sentence alone saves hours. Not by changing behavior, but by removing the fiction.
Pause here for a second.
How many things in your life are “time problems” that are actually preference problems? - Stop calling everything “work”
Answering messages isn’t work.
Reading about productivity isn’t work.
Reformatting a document you haven’t thought through isn’t work.
Calling low-responsibility activity “work” lets you feel busy without being exposed to results. It’s emotional insulation.
Real work has a risk attached to it: being wrong, being judged, or discovering you’re not as good as you hoped. That’s why you avoid it. Not because you’re bad with time, but because time reveals priorities mercilessly.
If you want more usable hours, downgrade the status of fake work. Let it feel small. Because it is. - Decide what you are willing to be bad at
You cannot maximize time while trying to be competent at everything. That’s not a scheduling issue; it’s an identity issue.
People who “manage time well” aren’t superior planners. They’re ruthless about neglect. They let emails pile up. They disappoint acquaintances. They are mediocre at things they’ve decided don’t matter.
Meanwhile, you’re trying to respond thoughtfully to everyone, keep every option open, and still make progress on what you claim is important.
Pick three things you’re willing to be publicly bad at.
Not secretly bad, visibly bad.
Your time will immediately reappear. - Notice how often you delay decisions to feel productive
You research instead of deciding.
You compare instead of committing.
You “think it through” until the moment quietly expires.
This feels responsible. It’s usually fear.
Every delayed decision taxes time twice: once while you hover, and again when you scramble later. Decisiveness isn’t about speed; it’s about closing loops so they stop draining attention.
Make small, slightly under-informed decisions faster. You’re not optimizing a spacecraft. You’re choosing a gym, a topic, a draft, or a direction that can be corrected later.
Maximizing time often looks like tolerating imperfection sooner. - Stop trusting future-you
Future-you is always imagined as calmer, more disciplined, and strangely enthusiastic. Current-you keeps making promises to that imaginary person.
“I’ll do it later” is rarely a scheduling statement. It’s a way of offloading discomfort to someone who doesn’t exist yet.
If a task matters and you won’t do it now, assume you also won’t do it later, unless something external changes. Build around that truth.
This one stings a little.
Good. That means it applies. - Measure time by energy loss, not minutes
Two hours of shallow activity can leave you more depleted than four hours of focused effort. But most people still schedule by the clock, then wonder why nothing fits.
Some tasks drain you because they involve social performance, unresolved tension, or quiet resentment. Others restore you, even when they’re difficult.
Maximizing time means reducing activities with a high energy-to-outcome cost. Not eliminating hard things, but eliminating draining ones that produce nothing except the illusion of responsibility.
Pay attention to what makes you sigh before starting. That sigh is data. - Treat “open availability” as a liability, not a virtue
Being constantly reachable feels generous. It’s also a way of avoiding ownership of your own time.
When you don’t decide what your time is for, other people do it for you, politely, inefficiently, and without malice. Meetings appear. Requests expand. Days fill without your consent.
Highly effective people aren’t better at saying yes. They’re better at creating friction around access.
If someone can interrupt you at any moment, they will. Not because they’re rude, but because you made it easy. - Build days around ends, not tasks
Task lists grow. Endpoints clarify.
Instead of asking, “What should I do today?” ask, “What must be true by tonight for this day to count?”
A sent draft.
A finished outline.
A decision made.
A conversation concluded.
Most wasted time comes from mistaking motion for progress. Endpoints force honesty. You can’t half-finish an outcome.
This also exposes how little truly needs to happen on a given day, another uncomfortable but useful realization. - Accept that some time will be “wasted” on purpose
Trying to eliminate all wasted time creates a brittle life. One unexpected delay and everything collapses.
People who actually use time well allow unstructured gaps without narrating them as failure. They don’t need every minute to justify itself.
Ironically, this makes them more efficient. Because they’re not constantly recovering from self-imposed pressure.
You don’t need to optimize every hour. You need to stop lying about which ones matter.
Final thought
If you stripped away productivity systems, apps, and advice, your time would still go exactly where your values and fears point it.
Maximizing time isn’t about doing more. It’s about removing the hiding places.
If this article felt slightly annoying, good.
If it felt obvious after reading it, even better.
That’s usually how the useful stuff feels.
