Dynamic Time Management — Top 10 Ways to Put More Time into Your Life

If you want to decrease your overall stress levels and increase your spare time, you must forget what all the efficiency and time-management experts say about time management and what you should do to be more productive. The problem with classic time-management techniques is that you still end up working ten or twelve hours a day, possibly being a little more productive, but still feeling burnt out and with not much leisure time.

Instead, adopt the following ten time-management insights from various people that offer both inspiration and a lot of wisdom for creating more leisure time in your life:

• If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun.
— John Gage

• Remember that nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.
— Arthur Balfour

• When you are doing something difficult, tedious, or extremely time-consuming, ask yourself what would happen if you didn't do it. If the answer is nothing, or next to nothing, stop doing it.
— From Real Success Without a Real Job

• One of the best ways of avoiding necessary and even urgent tasks is to seem busily employed on things that are already done.
— John Kennett Galbraith

• If you're already in a hole, it's no use to continue digging.
— Roy W. Walters

• Never do today what you can do as well tomorrow; because something may occur to make you regret your premature action.
— Aaron Burr

• The time to relax is when you don't have time for it.
— Sydney J. Harris

• Choose one of these three ways to handle a task fast:
1. Do it yourself.
2. Hire an expert to handle it for you.
3. Decide that it isn't worth doing and strike it off your to-do list.
— From Real Success Without a Real Job

• Don't overdo things that shouldn't be done in the first place.
— Unknown wise person

• Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.
— Robert Byrne

• Learn to distinguish between these three:
1. Some things need doing better than you or anyone has ever done them before.
2. Some just need doing to get by.
3. Some are not necessary; they don't need doing and are best left to the misfits of this world to pursue.
— From Real Success Without a Real Job

The moral of the above time-management wisdom is straightforward: You can experience more leisure time and a full, relaxed, satisfying, and happy life today instead of fifteen or twenty years down the road. Tens of millions of people in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and many other countries have such a life.

Contrary to popular belief, however, a lifestyle with plenty of free time is not based on being a multi-millionaire. A full, relaxed, satisfying, and happy life is achieved by simply choosing it even though the vast majority of Americans don't.

Above all, forget about classic time-management techniques — clearly, they don’t work.