How to find time in your schedule to learn something new

Constant self-improvement, training, acquisition of new skills - the key to a successful, fulfilling life. But in a day of 24 hours, and it seems to work and free time on household chores does not remain at all. In fact it is not. But to find the time for self-education, the first step is to properly organize your schedule.

Time - the most valuable commodity that we have. One minute is replaced by another, and we can never turn back the clock. So we have to extract the maximum benefit from the time, that is.

We all want to live better. This can be achieved in various ways, such as expanding their horizons and learning something new. Whatever it was (the desire to write better, learning a new language, playing a musical instrument), acquisition new skills - proven way to advance their careers and develop the brain and its ability to learn.

Benefits of learning new skills are obvious, but there is a problem - how to find time in busy schedule to learn something new? And now we will try to answer this question.

Check your schedule

First, we must clearly understand how to spend your day.

Start by checking the calendar of all that you do throughout the day. Simply break all the cases into two categories (note their different colors):

1. Working time (blue).
2. Free time (green).

For example, on a schedule to Google Calendar once it becomes clear that I have more time from 15:30 to 17:30, before breakfast (if you get up early), lunch time and after 19:00.

This is already more than enough to highlight the day 30-60 minutes to learn something new, instead of hovering in social networks or dinner.

When you fully check the schedule of your day, you will be surprised how much free time you have to acquire a new skill.

prioritize

To prioritize your schedule, we use the method of the US president - Eisenhower matrix.

The essence of this method lies in the fact that all the tasks can be divided into four categories:

1. Urgent and important. Do this immediately.
2. It is important, but not urgent. Decide when you will do it.
3. Urgent but not important. Delegate.
4. Non-urgent and unimportant. Leave it for later.

»
To understand all the features of this method, just try to relate each his task with one of the suggested categories.

All that is important is seldom urgent, and all that urgent, is rarely important.

Dwight Eisenhower (Dwight Eisenhower)

First of all focus on what kind of routine tasks, you can now! delegate or postponed. If you have a task list or calendar, ask yourself:

• What is my main goal, which I'm trying to achieve? (Learn Spanish, increase profits, and so on.)
• Which of these tasks will bring me to the goal?
• Which of inefficient tasks I can tell you from doing what I can to completely abandon?

Too often we do useless tasks and spend them most of your day, instead of just delegate it or leave it for later.

according to ParetoOnly 20% of our efforts generate 80% of the desired result, so make sure that you selected tasks in the section "make" and "solve" the Eisenhower matrix thoughtfully and strategically.

After Eisenhower matrix fill, double-check my schedule again and remove all the tasks that you carried to the unimportant.

Permanent employment - is a form of laziness, laziness to think and to understand their actions.

Tim Ferris (Timothy Ferriss)

Optimize

The next step - optimize your schedule.

You can do this in three ways:

1. Reduce the time to complete work tasks. After all, even the most talented of us prokrastiniruyut. This is best explained in a certain Parkinson's law: Work fills all allotted time on it. This means that if you think the task will take two hours give yourself a deadline of one hour. And you'll find a way to do everything to the designated time.
2. Use the free time that you spend on unimportant things. Are there periods during the day when you just do not do anything or perform tasks, to kill time? Perhaps you are reading every night entertaining articles or check your email more than five times a day. We all have that. Instead, use one of these segments is not particularly important time for the acquisition of new knowledge.
3. Collect all the segments of free time together. This is the simplest life hacking, which allow you to take all the best from both. Multitasking does not work during execution of important work, but it is an effective way to save time when you are idle. For example, rather than plunge into social networks or check email, do it at the same time. By linking these tasks together, you could not concentrate at 100%, but it will save time. Your productivity will not be affected (unless you are using a multi-tasking in his spare time, rather than in the workplace).

When you use one or all three of the following methods to optimize your schedule, you will find for itself a couple of hours trying to learn a new skill.