How many days, weeks, or months have passed, and you feel you haven't accomplished anything? Are you constantly feeling rushed and stressed? If so, you need to find ways to gain more time. Of course, it is impossible to buy time, but some practices will help make it feel like you are gaining more time each day. This blog post will discuss some of those practices.

Do you feel like you don't have enough time each day?

Time is the most valuable resource we have. But unfortunately, it's the only non-renewable resource, and there are only a fixed number of hours each day. So we can only make good use of it if we want to feel like we have more time. Unfortunately, some of us waste our precious hours doing things that are not essential or don't contribute anything to our goals. When we do such things, we feel like there's not enough time to do our important tasks, and that's because we wasted them on something else.

It's up to us how we want to use our time. We can choose what activities to do as time passes. It's impossible to add more time each day, but we can feel like we have more of it by utilizing practices that make the most of our daily minutes and hours. The gist is that we must determine what things should get prioritized each day so that we accomplish them and end up having more free time to do other things we may like to do. It will then feel like we just gained additional time by being efficient and productive in its use. Here are some things you can try to add more time to your daily life.

1. Have more self-discipline

The first thing you will want to develop to gain more time is to build the discipline you have for yourself. You can do many other things to add more time, and they involve a good amount of discipline. Without it, you will most likely fail, which causes you to spend your time not doing anything productive or beneficial to you. There are ways to build self-discipline; it takes time to make them a habit. However, once you do make them a habit, it will only feel natural to have the capacity to resist doing useless things and prioritize what matters to you at the moment.

2. Be efficient

Efficiency means you get more done in less time. If something can get accomplished using the least amount of time while using the fastest means to finish it and still delivering quality output, you will want to use such efficient means to get things done. A good example is using the various technology around us to help make our work faster. Computers make typing documents and processing various applications more quickly, while smartphones allow for accessible communication and make it possible to multitask. Used right, technology is a great help to get things done faster; coupled with other efficiency practices, you can save time and use it for other things.

3. Structure your day

You may waste your time each day if you don't have any structure and plans for what you will do for the day. Structuring involves planning activities, such as creating a to-do list to note all tasks you have for the day, starting with the most important ones. It also involves creating a schedule for how much time you will spend on each task and when they should start and end, among other things. It may look troublesome to make such extensive and detailed planning, but you will gain more time by having a layout of what you should do each day instead of randomly picking what job you would like to do.

4. Make good use of idle time

Every day, you may have times when you end up not doing anything for a while. Maybe you finished a task much earlier, some circumstances caused some of your activities to get canceled, or you ended up waiting because something hasn't happened yet, leaving you with an empty time slot. So what do you do with it? Some will choose to use this time to do some leisurely activities, and this is fine if there is little or nothing more left to do on your plate. However, if you know that there are still some other tasks on your list, this idle time can get turned into productive time. You can use this time slot to do your other jobs, make some preparations, or do early work. This way, even if one of your tasks got delayed and took longer to finish, you gained some head start on your other activities, so no time gets wasted.

5. Do things bit by bit

If a certain task can take a lot of time to finish, such as cleaning the entire house or completing a large project, why not schedule time each day to end portions of your larger tasks? Try cleaning a room in your home daily instead of cleaning everything in one day. It's more tiring and physically demanding to clean an entire house in one day than doing chunks daily, and you may end up procrastinating if you get too tired when doing everything in a single day. The same thing can get done on your other larger and long-term projects. Don't try to finish everything in one day, but dedicate a specific, more minor task that is part of your more significant projects to spend each day. You will accomplish more because you don't get exhausted from doing something heavy in one go, and you can free up more time each day.

6. Wake up and start earlier if you can

Starting your daily activities a few minutes or even an hour earlier than usual will give you more time each day, and this is also assuming you finish all your tasks on time. So if you can, try to wake up earlier if you need a head start. Of course, you shouldn't sacrifice your sleeping hours; if you want to wake up early, you should also sleep early. It can mean minimizing or avoiding the things you shouldn't do before going to sleep. Starting early also means giving yourself some buffer in case things go wrong, such as getting caught in traffic on the way to work. A buffer time can turn into time for early work in case nothing goes wrong. So it would be best if you got into the habit of giving yourself some allowance in time, as things can change and disrupt your schedule, and it's better to prepare for them.

7. Don't procrastinate

Procrastination is your mortal enemy if you want to gain more time. Nothing wastes more time than doing activities that are not urgent and don't contribute anything to your daily work and goals, such as watching TV or spending time checking numerous e-mails and notifications on your phone. Time can pass when you lose yourself in such distractions, and when you check back on time, you realize you are late on your deadlines, and this can carry over to your other tasks for the day. Discipline and self-control come in handy in combatting procrastination. There is time for leisure and work. When you finish everything necessary, you can have time later to do your leisurely activities. If something can get finished now, do it instead of prolonging it for later.

Manage your time well, and you will gain more of it.

We can't add an extra hour to the 24 hours we have each day, but we can do things that make it feel like we just gained more time than we have. Time management is crucial in adding more time by making the most of it by doing the most productive and essential things and prioritizing them first before doing any form of leisure or items that are not urgent. Multitasking can even work to a certain degree by doing another activity while doing something that doesn't require too much labor and thought, such as waiting in a line or doing work that already feels familiar to you so you can do them with ease. While we know that time is limited each day, it doesn't mean we always rush and finish everything like the end is coming tomorrow. It's okay to leave some stuff unfinished as we can't possibly finish everything in a single day, especially if we have large projects on our plate. What's important is that we don't delay doing our priorities and finish them as early as possible so that we will have time to do things we like and aid in giving us fulfillment and happiness.