You Have More Time Than You Think to Be a Creator

Take back control of your schedule with these practical steps.

🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With this newsletter I’ll help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business. I’ve been doing this since 2010.
I talk about productivity, automation, strategy and mindset.

You probably feel you don’t have enough time for content creation. And you are probably right.

I talked and worked with creators from all over the world in the last 13 years. They never have time.

But they could have far more, enough to publish regularly and grow an audience. And they don’t need to quit their job, overhaul their life or stop seeing people.

They just need to use their time better.

Here’s the simple process I always recommend to find out where your time bucket is leaking and how to fix it.

Track your time

Time is subjective. We need to make it objective.

For example, I love hunting for the most effective words to express a concept in my articles. So, sometimes, I get lost in rabbit holes. I end up spending 15 minutes on a single sentence, while editing the entire article should take at most a couple of hours.

But I’m aware of this only if I record how much time I actually spend on editing. When I see editing is taking too long, I can investigate the reasons.

Here’s how to gain awareness of how you’re actually spending your time:

• record how much time you spend on everything you do during the day,

• go on for a few weeks,

• find possible improvements.

The first time you track everything you do throughout your day, epiphanies are inevitable. It’s like when a friend points out some lifelong annoying habit of yours that you never noticed.

It’s a tedious activity, I know. But you need to do it only for some weeks to gain clarity.

Let’s start from the beginning.

The easiest way to track your time

I recommend using an app. Time tracking works only if you do it consistently. When you miss too many activities, you create an incomplete picture and draw the wrong conclusions.

But it’s a tedious activity. And when you’re moving from one task to another, it’s easy to forget about it. An app usually requires only a couple of taps to start tracking. It almost removes all the obstacles.

The one I used and recommend is Toggle Track.

It's free, works on any device, and it’s immediate to use. You just need to add a widget to your phone home screen. Then, to track a task:

• unlock the screen,

• tap on the widget,

• add the name of the task.

Recorded activities can be tagged and organized into projects. This makes it easy to analyze how you spend your time in detail. (We’ll see how in a minute)

Notice pattern with regular reviews

The simple act of starting and stopping the tracking boosts your awareness:

• you force yourself to think about what you are doing,

• you notice how long you have been doing it,

• you realize you got distracted when you forget to stop tracking a completed task.

But the maximum clarity comes from reviewing the data you recorded.

Your days and weeks aren't exactly identical to one another (at least I hope so!). That’s why you need to keep tracking everything for at least 4 weeks. Everything, not just job tasks.

Then, once per week, or every few weeks, you do your review.

Essential categorization

After a few days (or weeks), you’ll have an endless jumble of different tasks. Staring at this long, amorphous list will just make your eyes cross. It won’t help.

Use tags and projects to organize what you tracked and find patterns.

If analysis paralysis is the norm for you, watch out: we are not aiming for perfection. You just need a few tags and projects:

• Add one project for every major area of your life and work. For example: hobbies, health, leisure, relationships, specific work projects, and so on. Consider adding a new project when a single one takes over 10 hours every week.

• Choose tags that qualify the tasks. For example: deep work, urgent tasks, emergencies or unexpected events, appointments and meetings, and so on. Remember that a task can have more than one tag.

Turn information into insights

Use the following questions during your review.

Did you track enough?

Often, at night, I can remember a single thing I accomplished during the day. But I’m exhausted because I’ve done so much. This happens when I jump from one task to another like a train with no stops.

It’s easy to fall into this mindlessness also when you are tracking your time. So, some tasks may be missing from your report.

Verify that you tracked at least 80% of your time every day. If not, your data could be misleading.

Try for a few more days, and pay more attention. This doubles as an awareness exercise, too.

Leverage routines

Repeated tasks are fertile soil for time savings.

If you shave a few minutes off something you repeat every day, you end up saving hours each month. And you could also realize it can be eliminated altogether!

So, take stock of everything recurring in your reports.

Find the whales

Very long tasks offer the greatest opportunity to save time. By simplifying, trimming, and optimizing, you may get dozens of minutes back for each one of them.

Sort your tasks by duration, from longest to shortest:

• Are there unusually long ones?

• Why did they take so long? (People, distractions, and perfectionism are the usual suspects)

• Can they be separated into smaller tasks, so that you can optimize each part?

Aggregate

Look at the reports for projects and tags.

You’ll probably be appalled at the totals. Hours every week wasted on low-impact activities like going to the bathroom, commuting, preparing meals, doing nothing…

Stop being embarrassed by your use of time

Now that you have more awareness, you can decide how to improve. In the previous step, you found tasks that take a lot of time. Four main interventions are available to take back at least part of that time:

• remove,

• replace,

• delegate,

• rearrange.

Remove

This is the most powerful step. And the most difficult.

You may be clinging to some decade-long habits. They are part of your life, your identity.

There’s no need to change abruptly and forever. Just run an experiment.

Eliminate a potentially useless task from your calendar for a few weeks. Or reduce the time spent on it. At the end of the test, evaluate the impact on your life and work. If it’s negligible, cut it permanently.

I used to start my day reading newsletters and articles. I needed to start slowly, because I felt tired. But I overdid it. Some days, I was ready to write early. But I was wasting my creative juice reading other people’s work. So, I now start the day reading only when I severely under-slept.

Replace

This is the softer alternative to removing.

Some tasks are useful but may just be taking too long. You need that time for something more impactful.

For example, working out is crucial. But there’s so much more I need and want to do. So, I only focus on the essentials (strength and mobility) and choose the most efficient routines (15 to 30 minutes long).

Ask yourself: is there a more efficient way to do a task I can’t remove? It may deliver slightly lesser results, but the saved time compensates for it.

Automate/delegate

The number of tasks you can automate increases by the day. Make “There’s an app for that” your mantra.

Similarly, delegation isn't only for busy managers and CEOs. You can hire someone to clean your house. You can take your clothes to a laundry service. You can ask your kids to help with the chores. And you can ask your spouse or roommates for favors just for a limited time until your project takes off or you figure out how to fit it into your life.

So, when you see a necessary task you don’t like, or you don’t add value to, ask yourself:

• Is there a site or app that can automate it?

• If not, how can I delegate it?

Rearrange

After you've removed, replaced, and automated or delegated everything you can, your last resource is to remodel your week.

Often, you don’t need more time. You just need to free up time at specific moments.

For example, I am more creative in the morning (as most people). Content creation is the backbone of my business. So, I guard the first hours of my day as the treasure room in my castle. I moved my workouts in the afternoon, streamlined breakfast and lunch preparation, and do 99% of my calls after lunch. This way, I create better content faster.

Doing high-impact tasks at the right time increases your ROI:

• choose your priority,

• figure out the moment in the day with the highest energy and focus,

• do everything you can to free up time at that moment as often as possible.

Enjoy your newfound time!

Society, culture, and lack of awareness, push us to build frantic, unoptimized lives where we actually don’t have time for what counts. But we can take it back.

We just need practice.

I hope I convinced you that you can find time for those untouched ambitious projects weighing down your soul. You now have a strategy:

• track how you are currently using your days,

• find areas of improvement,

• remove, replace, automate/delegate and rearrange,

• let’s do it!

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