Are You Ready to Streamline Your Life?
Episode #1 of the course Streamline your life to have more time for what matters by Liz Huber
“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.” —William Penn
Hi, I’m Liz, mindset and productivity coach and blogger at refinedlife.io. Welcome to the course!
Many of my clients come to me overwhelmed, unfulfilled, and stressed out. They want to claim back their time and focus on what is truly important in their life instead of grinding away on their never-ending list of tedious tasks and commitments.
And throughout the next ten days, we will do just that! You’ll learn how to free up your time, energy, and mental space by optimizing all the menial, time-sucking, and annoying parts of your day. As a result, you’ll be able to do more of the things that actually matter to you.
In today’s lesson, you will define your streamlining goal and get to know the transformational five-step streamlining process that you can use for every aspect of your life. In the following lessons, I will guide you through both universal and specific strategies for the tasks that fill up the bulk of our days: work, household chores, errands, eating, consuming information, and communicating.
Your Streamlining Goal: What Would You Do with More Time?
Every concept, strategy, and tool mentioned in this course has one single objective: to free up your time. My hope is that streamlining your life will allow you to do more of the things that excite you, bring you joy, and fulfill you. Whether it is traveling more, starting your own business on the side, spending more time with family, or training for a marathon, the possibilities are endless!
But the reality is, most of us are so busy 24/7 that having a little extra time on our hands overwhelms us. We have a hard time answering the question, “What would I do with more time?” because we are so used to not having any!
That’s why if you don’t make your intentions clear, freeing up your time will lead to one of two things:
1. You will end up doing more of the same. Usually, that is work. Which is fine, if that’s your goal. But I assume you didn’t choose this course to find out how you can stay in the office even longer.
2. You will fall into a hole and don’t know what to do with yourself. You might fall into destructive behaviors and end up worse than before.
So, take your time today to reconnect with your true desires and make a list of the things you want to do with your extra time.
The Five-Step Streamlining Process
Analyze > Eliminate > Optimize > Automate > Outsource
At its core, streamlining your life is about working more efficiently in areas of your life that are not as important, so you can use your time and energy on the things that DO matter.
Here is the transformational five-step process that will help you do that:
1. Analyze: The first step to taking back your time is to understand how you are spending it. For each area of life, you will start with breaking down all your commitments, defining them clearly, assessing the time spent on them, and asking yourself if and how you can streamline them.
2. Eliminate: Elimination is the purest and most effective form of streamlining: Nothing should be optimized, automated, or outsourced if it can be eliminated in the first place!
3. Optimize: Once you’ve stripped down every process to its bare minimum, it’s time to create the most efficient workflow for your remaining activities.
4. Automate: This is usually the fun part! Automation is about using technology to perform manual and time-consuming processes. You can automate the activity itself, the decision about an activity, or the trigger for an activity.
5. Outsource: Many productivity geeks consider outsourcing the holy grail of streamlining! Whether you hire a virtual assistant to make appointments or a runner from TaskRabbit to do your errands, the concept is always the same: Use money to buy time!
Take Action Today: Write down WHY you want to have more time in your life!
Tomorrow, we will dive deeper into the five-step process, and I will show you powerful strategies that you can apply right away.
Happy streamlining,
Liz
Recommended video
The Three Most Important Questions to Ask Yourself (How to Define Your Life Goals)
Recommended book
Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
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