Time Freedom: How to Achieve Time Freedom

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Time freedom means choosing where to spend your time and choosing who to spend your time with. Having freedom of time means being totally clear about what you want to do with your time to create the bigger and better future you want for yourself. Achieving time freedom makes you more intentional about your time, makes you appreciate the time you have and allows you to slow down and fully experience everything that life has to offer.

Having time freedom means you understand the importance of your time, and have decided to spend it on the things and with the people that matter most.

This means you have chosen to create the life you want. Achieving time freedom allows you to spend more time at work doing more of what you love to do, and at home following your passions and expanding the time you spend with the people that matter most.

The challenge many people have, of course, is that the time freedom they want to achieve is sucked up by complexities and complications in their business and life. This especially creates a lack of time and taking on too many tasks and opportunities.

In this article I’m going to share the meaning of time freedom and provide four simple tips you can use to expand your time freedom, so you have more time for the things that matter most.

What is time freedom?

Time freedom is about spending your time doing what you really love doing with the clients and people who mean the most to you. It is about being intentional about where to invest your time and focusing your time on the activities that create the biggest impact and bring you the most satisfaction. Having time freedom is about having the ability to live a full life and have the time to pursue other interests outside of work.

But achieving time freedom can be tough. Rather than having the time freedom you may have dreamt about, you may be working longer and longer hours, and doing activities that neither excites you or motivates you.

Having time freedom means you feel confident about where you’re spending you’re time, as you’ve deliberately chosen to spend your time on what matters most and gives you the most joy and satisfaction.

How to achieve time freedom

Here are 4 strategies you can use right now to increase your time freedom:

1. Get clear on where you’re spending your time

In order to create greater time freedom, it’s important to understand where you currently spend your time. Time freedom comes when you can choose to focus your time on the activities you love to do and bring in the biggest revenue. To help you achieve more freedom of time, you need to eliminate the other stuff you’re currently doing.

Here’s how to do it. Set aside five minutes, grab yourself a pad and pen and find somewhere quiet. To start creating more freedom of time you need to look at where you’re currently spending your time.

Start by writing down all the activities you’re currently doing in a typical week that you hate doing, are frustrated with, know you’re not very good at, and that you just wish would either go away or someone else could do.

This list will give you greater clarity on what you should stop doing if you really want to manage your time better and increase your time freedom.

When you have your list, pick 5 of the activities you want to take action action on eliminating immediately.

Then write down the first action step you can take to make that a reality.

2. Take control of your time

Now you have your list, you may be feeling some resistance.

Many people I speak with feel like they have to justify stopping doing the activities they simply don’t want to do.

Or, they actually don’t know what to do with that time as they’re so used to firefighting and stepping in.

In both instances, they feel that doing these “stuff activities” is simply part and parcel of work.

They’ve always done them and they’ve become a bad habit.

It is what it is.

Create time freedom for your biggest priorities

To really grow your business or career to the next level, you simply have to create more time freedom to spend on your most valuable and best money making activities that you love to do. This requires a commitment to spend more time on your biggest priorities and less time on everything else.

You have to build a support structure around you to take some of your current work away. This could be a team, virtual team, a collaborator or a company you can outsource specific work to.

If you feel you can’t work any longer or any harder, you’re going to reach a ceiling in terms of what you can achieve on your own.

Tough questions to ask if you want more freedom of time

If you want to achieve more time freedom, you’re going to have to ask yourself some tough questions.

“What can I stop doing?”

“What is really holding me back?”

“Is my time best spent doing certain activities?”

“How could I free up more time each week?”

“What difference would more time freedom really make?”

If you have big goals that you’re shooting for, you have to be prepared to make some changes, otherwise you’ll simply stay stuck at your current level.

3. Transform your time with the right team

One of the hardest shifts for ambitious leaders, entrepreneurs and small business owners is to stop doing everything yourself.

If you’re busy doing everything that it becomes difficult to separate out what you want to do and don’t want to do. What activities create the biggest impact and which ones don’t.

But, what if you focused more of your time on what you do best. This allows you to question whether some of the activities you’re currently doing help you achieve the results you want.

When you make the decision to focus on achieving bigger goals you have to focus more on what you love to do and are best at.

Then, it becomes about finding other people who have specialist skills that to free up your time.

Finding the right people creates more time freedom

Finding the right people to support you and your goals isn’t a quick fix. But every person you can find will make a big difference to how you manage your time.

If you’re a photographer, think about how many hours could be freed up if you had help with editing.

If you’re a mortgage or insurance broker, think about how many hours could be feed up if you had more case workers.

One of my clients hired a virtual assistant, who freed up 20 hours of their time a week.

Another found marketing expertise to handle social media, blog writing and sales copy, freeing up 15 hours a week.

If you want to achieve more freedom of time, do more of what you are great at, and find other experts or support to free you up from the things you’re simply not great at.

4. Focus on progress, not perfection

Many ambitious leaders, entrepreneurs and business owners I speak with struggle with perfectionism. This perfectionist mindset holds them back from making real progress towards goal achievement by wasting valuable amounts of time trying to make things perfect.

If you want to achieve time freedom, it’s essential to focus on progress not perfection. Tweaking, amending, changing and trying to make things perfect simply wastes time and takes you away from your highest value activities that will move you closer towards achieving your goals.

Be happy with the work you’ve created and then move onto the next important project or task. Read more on overcoming perfectionism.

7 ways to work smarter and be more productive

Now I’d love to hear from you.

What’s one simple step you can take to increase your time freedom?

Which big obstacle stops you from managing tim effectively?

Let me know your best tip for freeing up time in the comments.

About the Author

Mark Pettit is a small business coach to business owners who want to simplify their time, energy and focus so they can multiply their freedom, impact and results.

Get more articles, tips and tools to help you simplify your time to multiply your results on the blog.

If you want to increase your time freedom, focus on the right activities and get results 10x faster, grab your free Productivity Mastery Daily Planner to 10x your productivity and achieve your goals quicker.