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20 Productive Ways to Use Your Free Time: Explore New Hobbies and Passions



When it comes to time management, the first step you need to take is finding out where your time actually goes. You may believe that you only send 30 minutes on emails, but in reality that task is eating-up an hour of your day.




20 Productive Ways to Use Your Free Time




The thing is, delegating or outsourcing are real time-savers since it lessens your workload - which means you have more time to spend on more important tasks or doing less work. Either hand over responsibilities to team members who are qualified or hire an experienced freelancer. And, if you do decide to do in-house training, the initial investment will be worth-it in the end.


For example, instead of sleeping-in until 6:30am, wake-up an hour earlier. Personally, I find 5:15am to be the most productive time of the day since it gives me time to exercise, plan-out my day, go through my emails, and even work on side projects without being disturbed.


Jumping immediately from one task or meeting to the next may seem like a good use of your time, but it actually has the opposite effect. We need time to clear our minds and recharge by going for a walk, meditating, or just daydreaming. After all, the human brain can only focus for about 90-minutes at a time.


The average American spends 2.5 days each year looking for misplaced items. As a result, we spend over $2.7 billion annually in replacing these items. Instead of wasting both your time and money, get organized.


Think hobbies are just a frivolous waste of time? Think again, big shot. You may be the pro-est of professionals, always hustling, loving the grind. But hobbies definitely have their place and can be extremely beneficial.


Two episodes of The Office and an hour of your day is already gone! Try spending that time on a hobby instead. In fact, you might as well try tracking your time spent (whether on laughing at Michael Scott or cultivating a new hobby) with Toggl and see how the hours in your day all break down!


So why are crafts of this kind such a great way to spend your free time? Well, just as we mentioned with cooking, many crafts require planning skills. They also allow you explore your creativity in many different ways.


Studies show that time spent outside can improve cognitive performance, relieve stress, improve creativity and more. So get productive and go outside! After you finish reading this blog post, of course.


The other interesting thing about meditation is that it can alter our perception of time. This might be great for people who always feel hurried and harried no matter how much time they actually have. It also pairs well with a time tracker like Toggl. You can track your progress by timing your sessions and thinking about whether the sessions feel longer or shorter.


There are many benefits to starting a side hustle, the most obvious being the potential for financial gain. This is where the free Toggl time tracker can be incredibly useful, because it has a built-in feature that allows you to see how profitable a certain task or project is. Who knows? Your side gig might end up becoming more profitable than your day job!


Just remember, the perfect pastime for you will be something you enjoy doing and an activity that either teaches you something or makes you think (stretches your brain), or allows you to create something (make something amazing). All of the productive hobbies on this list meet those criteria.


A lot of students struggle to find free time, especially with exams and mocks coming up. Free time is easy to find if you know how to look for it, just taking a 20-minute break can be classed as free time!


If you are stressed and worried about exams and want to do something fun but still useful in your free time, there are many things that you can do. Some of my favourite examples of these types of activities would be:


Use the Adapt App!!! It is super easy to use and will significantly help you if you are short on time. You can type in what homework you have and set times to do all of them. You can add revision topics (they have topics that cover the entire syllabus for EVERY subject and exam board in the UK) or just little reminders (like tidy the study or change the bedlinen) to make your studying/chore/activity time run smoother.


Scroll through Pinterest for revision ideas. If I ever have a spare 5 minutes I take that time to scroll through Pinterest to find motivation for revision as well as new ways to lay out revision notes. This has helped me remarkably with increasing my average grades. A clear set of colourful hand-written (or typed) revision notes makes life so much easier, so why not dedicate a little bit of time to inspire yourself to make your notes that much better?


I hope my tips have inspired you to do something useful and productive with the free time you have and to spend that time wisely. It is really important to have some time to yourself, especially if you have any major exams/mocks coming up!


Adapt is a brand new app which creates a personalised, exam specific timetable for you, for free. Not only can you add revision to your calendar, but your homework, topic tests, and any other task you want to do! There are so many exciting features to discover.


Check out this post for 20 things that waste time during the day to help simplify your life and schedule. Learn some time management tips and strategies to help you be more productive, efficient and get more out of your day.


Here is a list of 20 ways you might be wasting time during your day and what you can do about it. See if you recognise yourself in any of them! Avoiding these things could help simplify your life and create more time and ease in your day.


Keep a check on how much time you spend on social media and perhaps find ways to limit this time during the day if you feel you need to. Try this article on minimalism and social media for more tips on using social media mindfully.


I have curated all of these sites in a Wakelet collection. Feel free to make a copy, edit as needed for your class, and assign through Google Classroom or just share the link or QR Code.


Thanks for this article! I have shown these to my students and have them available to play whenever they have free time. They seem to love them and got really excited when I showed them. I also add code.org (Hour of Code) to my list of free time games.


What does it take to become more productive? Based on their recent research, the authors propose a process to help knowledge workers increase their productivity. This process involves thinking consciously about how you spend your time, deciding which tasks matter most to you and your organization, and dropping or creatively outsourcing the rest. These tasks can then be sorted into quick kills (things you can stop doing now, without any negative effects), off-load opportunities (work that can be delegated with minimal effort), and long-term redesign (work that needs to be re-conceived or restructured). Once these low-priority tasks are disposed of, the newly freed-up time can be spent focusing on more-important work.


Have you lost your love of reading books, perhaps you simply do not have time anymore, there is the housework, exercise, perhaps even the children? Who has time to read? But without reading, how do you continue to build your knowledge, learn new skills, or wade into a novel.


You will always know when to bring the kids to sports, bring them to the dentists or doctor appointments. You will know when your partner has an evening work event or when you are going on holiday in six months.


Podcasts are fun, and they can teach you a lot. Instead of checking social media, or listening to music, consider listening to a lecture or an informative podcast next time you work at your desk. The App Store, Spotify, and Stitcher are full of informative podcasts.


Researchers at the University of California found that the average office worker takes 23 minutes to return to the original task after being interrupted. Simply put, five interruptions per day could mean nearly 2.5 hours of overtime in your day.


Voice calls are so much more effective for any complex topic saving you both time and multiple interruptions from constantly having to pick up your phone and reply. Even though 29 million WhatsApp messages are sent per minute (according to Facebook), WhatsApp users also spend over 2 billion minutes making voice and video calls per day.


Whether you are at home or in the office, it is always beneficial to have your key working documents in the cloud. I use OneDrive with Microsoft Office 365, but Dropbox is also a great solution. Instant document backup and accessible from everywhere the cloud is your friend.


A good way to think of personal assistants is a secretary and receptionist on your phone. A good personal assistant will increase your productivity by doing busy work, such as research and answering messages. Ideally, a personal assistant will give you more time.


Most social media is a waste of time because it forces you to answer meaningless messages. Also, social media can force you into mindless arguments and needless conflicts. Turning off social media can transform your phone from a toy to a productivity enhancer.


Remove social media, games, and other time-wasters from your phone. Then install those apps on your PC. If you have to go out of your way to access the apps through your PC, you will be less prone to using them.


Be careful when you do this because you can transfer your time-wasting tech from one device to another. A good rule of thumb is to eliminate any social media you do not use for business or work purposes.


Limiting the use of time-wasting apps will make it more productive. Learning the difference between time-wasting apps and useful tools is the first step in turning your phone into a productivity tool.


The Amazon Kindle app, for example, offers access to over 850,000 books on Android and Apple phones. Thus, you can read for information on your phone instead of playing games or wasting time with social media. Many popular business titles are available. 2ff7e9595c


 
 
 

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