In the first half of the week I do the school runs for my two kids who go to school in Macclesfield.
In the second half we have my two older sons and I do the Bakewell and back school run.
At the moment, getting out of the car park at the Macclesfield school is particularly slow.
It’s never been the quickest but some local roadworks seem to be limiting the exit onto the main road.
And then further down that road, where I live, some more roadworks have made that get hugely congested around rush hour.
On Mondays I don’t have a choice as I need to get back to the club to the 9:30 session.
But on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I’m in no rush.
So I sit in the car park writing blogs.
I’m writing this one on a Wednesday morning in the school car park.
I use voice to text to dictate the majority of it.
And then come back later and edit and neaten it up.
I usually do this until, at the very least, the car park is completely empty.
And I usually check on Google maps to see what’s happening near my house before deciding when to leave.
I’m in the car park for at least at half an hour.
Sometimes an hour or even 90 minutes.
But that’s a far more productive use of time than crawling home and wasting however long that takes.
This time writing blogs in the car will free up time elsewhere.
As I’m sure we all can.
Because no matter how busy we are, I would wager you that every single one of us could be making more efficient use of our time.
There’ll be things that we are doing that we can just do less of or stop (check the screen time on your phone for a start).
We can look to batch certain activities so that, for example, rather than being ten lots of half an hour across the week, we do two 90 minute blocks for the same amount of work (other durations and frequencies are available).
We can just look to rearrange when we do certain things.
Put tasks that require similar equipment or are in a similar location together as much as possible.
I appreciate this deems kind of obvious.
But we all let it slip.
In a decade of recommending it, I’ve never had someone accurately track their use of time for a week and not being able to find a way to reassign that saves them at least 10% of that time.
Freeing up the few hours that they were perhaps previously struggling for that they can spend on exercise and the like.
One of my favourite poems is IF by Rudyard Kipling.
And I particularly like the line “If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run”.
For those of you that are members, check out www.myrise.co.uk/time to help you reassign some of yours.
I’ve never had anyone do this who hasn’t felt it worthwhile.
An unwillingness to do this is a decision to keep ourselves stuck behind that “too busy” excuse.
Too busy to be less busy?
Haven’t joined?
Then what are you waiting for?
Save a space, lock in current prices and get rest of the year for free –> www.myride.co.uk/apply
Much love,
Jon ‘karaoke’ Hall
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
