All jokes aside about Molly-Mae and everyone having the same 24hours in a day, I would wager that you don’t exactly spend your time in anywhere near the most efficient way.

Thinking about where you spend your time and re-arranging WHEN you do things can really increase your productivity

Where we spend our time:

Ofcom research found that in 2020, the average screen time (on phone apps, TV, games consoles, streaming services etc) totalled around 5hrs and 30 mins for UK adults between the ages of 25 and 34.

That is an immense amount of time that we are spending on distractions or “relaxing” each day.

These findings are confirmed by Ourworldindata in a December 2020 article that looked at where people spend their time across 23 countries and found that the average daily time spent on “leisure” activities being around 305 mins (or just over 5 hours).

I invite you to think about how much time to you spend on the above out of habit each day. With that in mind, do you ever tell yourself (or others) that you “don’t have time” for things?

Could you move just one hour out of our screen time and put it to better use?

The question:

What if you could spend an extra hour per day on something productive? Something that was going to improve your life? Help you earn more money? Learn a new skill? Get a head start on your day?

Well altering your sleep pattern is certainly one way to do it!

Out of habit:

That ever elusive “extra hour a day to do XYZ” is there… it’s just hidden in poor habits.

Quite simply, by going to bed an hour earlier and getting up an hour earlier, you are more likely to spend that additional hour being productive than you are using it to “wind down” at the end of the day.

Think about it… It’s 7pm, you are fed, you have done all of our daily chores and now it’s time to wind down at the end of the day. Except you have about 3 more hours to kill before you need to start getting ready for bed and 3 hours to “Kill” is quite a lot.

3 whole hours to kill before bed…What am I going to do? Sit here and be bored? Do more work at this time of night?

So out of habit, we spend it scrolling through our phone and watching streaming services.

Why getting up earlier works:

We are presented with fewer distractions.

Most people don’t get up at 05:00 am so you have fewer distractions getting up at this time than if you woke up around 6:30 with the rest of the world.

Check out this article written by Gabrielle Kassel where she went to bed early every night for a week and see what you think: https://www.healthline.com/health/healthy-sleep/sleeping-at-9pm

Want to get the most out of that extra hour?

Plan tomorrow, today.

To get the most our of your additional hour, spend time at the end of each day planning what you want to accomplish the following day. It also helps to think about and plan in WHEN you are going to do the items on your to-do list as this helps increase the chances that you will actually do them.

But what if you struggle to get to sleep?

See my article on sleep here for ways to help improve your sleep and make getting to sleep easier and more reliable.