How to Manage Your Time for Happiness
Read time: 2.5 min
Core Idea
Deliberate time management strategies, such as Ryan Serhant's "1000 Minute Rule," align daily actions with goals, emphasising the importance of prioritizing high-value tasks, outsourcing low-value tasks, and living intentionally to achieve personal fulfillment and professional success.
Top Thoughts
The “1000 Minute Rule” states that 24 hours a day multiplied by 60 minutes gives you 1,440 minutes. Deduct time for sleeping and eating, and there are about 1000 minutes left. This is your time budget for the day, which should be spent as carefully as money.
Conduct a time audit to clarify how time is spent and identify areas for improvement and alignment with goals. Collect and analyze data on time allocation to make data-informed decisions about how time is being spent and where adjustments are needed.
Consider time as your partner, working together to be productive and successful, rather than viewing it as an enemy.
Follow a task triage system to categorize and prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, focusing on tasks that uniquely provide value and drive meaningful impact and outsourcing low-value, time-consuming activities.
Align time management strategies with personal, family, and business goals. Create a deliberate, personalized schedule that sets boundaries and allocates focused time for each aspect of your life.
Practice being mindful and present in each moment, avoiding distractions, and fully engaging in the task.
Recognize that time management strategies should be tailored to individual values, goals, and circumstances and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach.
Quick Quotes
"When you make time your partner, you're working together to be productive and successful."
“[Serhant] believes in eating the frog first and doing the hardest professional tasks at the very beginning of the day, and he believes that time is at least, if not more, important than money, and he makes his decisions accordingly.”
“[It’s] all about maximizing the time in [your] day to its highest and best use.”
“Time is really scarce and precious. And unlike money, you can't earn more of it. That thousand minutes is all you're going to get, and then it goes away when the next day starts.”
“If you treat your minutes like dollars and you have a client that yells at you for five minutes. Let's say you lose $5, would you throw away the rest of the money for the day? Because some people get in bad moods then let that affect the rest of their day, and then you're wasting the rest of the day. But he's saying, would you ever throw away that money just because you lost $5? No. So he takes that five minutes yelling from a client, and he doesn't let it affect the other 995 minutes.”
“People who value time and are deliberate with how they spend time on a regular basis do report greater happiness, but only if they can get to the point where they're present in the moment that they've worked so hard to carefully plan.”
“Happiness research… suggests we need to live in accordance with our own personal ideals, not what our peers are doing, not what we think we should be doing in order to live a happy, successful, and fulfilling life.”
“I love the notion… thinking about time as his partner because I think so often we think about it as the enemy. "I'm running out of time, I'm never going to finish this." And that's just an interesting mind shift. If you can do that, maybe it helps you feel less stressed and more in control.”
Action Steps
Conduct a time audit - Assess how you currently spend your time and understand where your time is being allocated and where adjustments can be made. Regularly review this to assess where changes are needed.
Implement a task triage system - Categorize tasks based on their urgency and importance and prioritize tasks effectively to remain focused on activities that align with your goals. Delegate tasks when necessary.
Align your goals - Integrate your personal, family, and business goals into a cohesive plan to ensure that time is assigned to important tasks. Protect and allocate time accordingly.
Source
Whillans, A., Lord, H., & Kenny, B. (2023, Aug 15). Ryan Serhant: How to Manage Your Time for Happiness. [Web article, Podcast]. Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. (Link)
