8 Ways to Make Time for Your Dream

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”

-H. Jackson Brown

We all get overwhelmed with our daily routines and obligations. Jobs, family, and chores can consume so much of our schedule that we feel like we don’t have any time left over for working on our passions. Here are 8 ways to find more time to work on your passion:

1. Create a schedule. Sometimes, it helps to have a visual representation of how you spend your time. List your activities for an entire day – write down what you are doing each and every hour. Are you truly busy from dawn til dusk? The odds are that you will find a few gaps of time that can be re-purposed to your dream.
2. Multitask. Find a way to pursue your dream during other daily activities. For example: listen to a podcast about your passion during your commute, write your business plan during your lunch breaks, read a book about your dream during dinner, etc.
3. Cut back on time-sucking distractors. Don’t get suckered into leisure activities that eat up your day – a reality TV marathon, an addicting cell phone game, bottomless blog browsing or website surfing, etc. Instead, use these leisure activities as a reward – if you work on your dream for 15 minutes, you can watch 15 minutes of TV, etc.
4. Do the math. Even if you have a full time job or are a full time student, you still have tons of time for your dream. Don’t believe us? Run the numbers: there are 168 hours in a week. If you work 40 hours a week and spend another 49  sleeping per week (7 hours a night is what adults need), that leaves you with 79 hours of time that could be used to pursue your dreams per week.
5. Increase your efficiency. Abraham Lincoln said that if he had 6 hours to chop down a tree, he would spend 4 hours sharpening his axe. Follow honest Abe’s advice – before completing a task, spend some time researching how you can work smarter, not harder.
6. Maximize your morning. What time do you wake up? What if you woke up one hour earlier and spent that hour working on your dream? This will make you feel productive right from the start of your day.
7. Share responsibilities. Do the activities that take up the majority of your time need to be solo activities? Could you share any of these time-consuming responsibilities with loved ones, co-workers, or friends? For example: you could trade-off grocery shopping and cooking duties with a significant other, work with a partner to split tasks on a project, ask a friend to help you with chores, etc.
8. Take ownership of your time. Time is your most valuable asset and resource. Do not waste it on things that are not moving you forward to where you want to go in life.