“If only there were more hours in the day.”
It’s a phrase we all mutter, especially on a busy Thursday evening like this when the week’s deadlines are piling up. We’re stretched thin between work, family, side hustles, and the simple desire to have a moment to breathe. It feels like the only solution is more time.
But that’s a myth.
The most effective people in the world don’t have a secret stash of extra hours. They just understand that time isn’t something you get; it’s something you create. You create it by pulling the right levers.
This post isn’t about working harder or sleeping less. It’s about working smarter by using four powerful levers to gain more time for what truly matters: Delegation, Automation, Acceleration, and Elimination.
Are You the CEO or the Intern of Your Life?
Think about your life and work for a moment. Are you acting like the CEO or the intern? The CEO focuses on high-value, strategic decisions that drive growth. The intern handles the repetitive, time-consuming tasks.
In our own lives, we often try to be both. We’re making big career decisions one minute and then spending three hours doing laundry the next. To truly gain time, you have to start thinking like the CEO of your life and strategically hand off the intern’s work.
Four Levers to Gain More Time
1. The Delegation Lever: Buy Back Your Hours
The most straightforward way to gain more time is to use your money to buy it back. Your time is your most valuable, non-renewable asset.
- First, Calculate Your ‘Aspirational Hourly Rate’: This isn’t what you earn now; it’s what you want your time to be worth. If your goal is to earn ₦12,000,000 a year, your aspirational rate is roughly ₦6,000 per hour. This number is now your decision-making filter.
- Next, Audit Your Tasks: Identify the low-value, time-consuming activities you do that don’t require your unique skill. This could be anything from navigating the market for groceries and queuing for fuel to house chores and basic admin.
- Start Small: This might feel like a luxury at first, but the math is simple. A good laundry service might cost ₦8,000 for a week’s load. If doing it yourself takes 3 hours, and your time is worth ₦6,000/hour, you’ve just paid ₦8,000 to free up ₦18,000 worth of your potential focus time. That’s a profitable trade.
2. The Automation Lever: Put Repetitive Tasks on Autopilot
Many tasks drain our energy not because they’re hard, but because they’re a constant, nagging presence in the back of our minds. Automation silences this noise.
- Financial: Set up automatic bill payments for your NEPA bill or data subscriptions through your banking app.
- Scheduling: Use a tool like Calendly to stop the endless back-and-forth emails required to set a meeting.
- Workflow: Create templates for emails, reports, or proposals that you write frequently.
Automation isn’t just about saving minutes. It’s about saving the mental energy you waste remembering and executing these small, recurring tasks.
3. The Acceleration Lever: Use Tools to Think Faster
This isn’t about letting AI take over your thinking. It’s about using it as a brilliant, tireless assistant to accelerate your process.
- Brainstorming: Stuck on an idea? Ask an AI to generate 10 variations. Nine might be useless, but one could be the spark that ignites your best work.
- Summarizing: Need to understand a long report or academic paper quickly? Use an AI to summarize the key points in seconds.
- Drafting: The hardest part of writing is often starting. Ask an AI to create a rough first draft or outline that you can then shape, edit, and infuse with your own expertise and voice.
Use these tools to conquer the “blank page” and speed through the initial grunt work, so you can spend more time on high-level strategy and refinement.
4. The Elimination Lever: Reduce Optionality to Gain Focus
Every choice we make, what to wear, what to eat, which of fifty emails to answer first, drains our mental battery. This is decision fatigue, and it’s a silent killer of productivity. The most effective way to combat it is to make fewer decisions.
- Simplify Your Wardrobe: Adopt a simple “uniform” for workdays. You make one good decision upfront (what your uniform is) to save yourself from a daily decision.
- Plan Your Meals: Decide what you’re eating for the week in one session. This eliminates the daily 5 PM scramble and the mental energy it consumes.
- Theme Your Days: Assign a focus for each workday (e.g., Mondays for planning, Tuesdays for deep creative work). This removes the “what should I work on now?” paralysis.
Start a New Relationship with Time
Gaining time isn’t magic. It’s a series of strategic choices. It’s about deciding what’s truly worth your time and what can be delegated, automated, accelerated, or eliminated.
Stop wishing for more hours. Start being the CEO of the hours you already have.
Which of these four levers will you pull first to start gaining back your time this week?
