How to Create More Time in Your Schedule to Learn

31.03.2017 |

Episode #4 of the course How to speak Spanish fluently for beginners by Rype

 

Time is the most valuable commodity we have. Unlike money, every minute that goes by is another we can never get back.

While the benefits of learning Spanish are clear, the main problem most people have is actually finding the time in our schedule to learn and practice. This is what we’ll cover today.

Here’s how you can find more time in your schedule to learn Spanish.

 

Track

Before we dig deeper into finding more time in our schedules, we have to know how we spend our day in the first place. Start by tracking everything you’re doing during the day on your calendar. Keep it simple by categorizing each task into two colors representing:

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

When you keep track of exactly what you’re doing each day, you’ll be surprised to know how much free time you can invest to learn something new.

 

Prioritize

To prioritize your schedule, we’re going to use a framework developed by the 34th president of the United States, who led one of the most productive lives ever: Dwight Eisenhower.

It’s called “The Eisenhower Box.”

This powerful organizational framework allows you to prioritize the numerous tasks you have in the day into four categories:

• Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).

• Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).

• Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).

• Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).

What’s powerful about this framework is that there’s a simple action task with each categorization.

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” -Dwight Eisenhower

The first thing you should focus on is what you can immediately delegate or eliminate from your action task. Whether you have a to-do list or a calendar schedule, ask yourself:

• What’s my ultimate goal that I am trying to achieve? (learn Spanish, increase your business revenue, etc.)

• Which of these tasks will bring me closer to my goal?

• Which of these non-impactful tasks can I outsource or eliminate completely?

Too often we give prioritization to non-impactful tasks and waste a big chunk of our day instead of delegating or eliminating.

As Pareto’s Law states, only 20% of our efforts will result in 80% of our desired results, so make sure you choose your “do” and “decide” sections of the Eisenhower Box strategically and thoughtfully.

After filling in your Eisenhower Box, re-examine your schedule again and delete all the tasks in your schedule that belong to the “delegate” or “delete” sections.

“Being busy is a form of laziness — lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.”  -Tim Ferriss

 

Optimize

The next step is to optimize your schedule.

You can do this in three ways:

1. Shorten your work tasks: Most of us are talented at procrastinating. Best explained by the popular Parkinson’s Law, the amount of time that one has to perform a task is the amount of time it will take to complete it. This means that if you think a work task will take two hours, give yourself a deadline of one hour.

2. Cut out your least important free time: Are there spare times in your day where you simply do nothing or do time-wasting tasks?

3. Bundle your free times together: This is a quick hack that can give you the best of both worlds. For example, rather than giving up social media or email time, you can perform these tasks together.

Once you have completed all three or even one of these optimization processes, you’ll discover anywhere from one to several hours of extra time that you can dedicate to learning how to speak Spanish.

Tomorrow we’ll share one of the biggest language hacks that’s out there and how you can learn 93% of Spanish in just 66 days. See you tomorrow!

 

Recommended book

“Living Language Spanish” by Living Language

 

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