How to stop losing time.

At some point in my late twenties, I decided to stop losing time.

I was exhausted. The world moved too fast, and it was tough to keep up. Every day sped past me, especially those days when I just wanted to slow down and breathe.

Like many people at that age, I felt overworked and demotivated. I wasn’t sure of my career path. My job stressed me out. Insomnia turned into caffeine overload. Fatigue turned into temper flare-ups toward friends and loved ones. I couldn’t even count how many nights I spent wide awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, worrying, overthinking, and asking myself, is it always going to be like this?

The turning point came one morning when I woke up and felt different for the first time in years. Something had lifted. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what changed, but it was just enough of a shift to set things in motion. I took some time away from work. I joined a gym (and actually went, which is a completely different win). I started reading self-care books. I fixed my diet.

And somewhere in there, maybe a few months into it, I decided to stop losing time. Life had slowed down. Quality sleep and early bedtimes were doing wonders for my overall morale. Self-care was the priority, and I had control over how and where I invested my energy. Idle time has its purpose and benefits, but not when it steals most of your time, most of your week, most of your year.

I was ready to change.

Schedule everything

I was always a planner. Structure is healthy. You know that you have to be at work from hour A to hour B, and you structure the commute around that. Outside of this is your own time to split up however you choose — alone time, together time, sleep. Working hours are usually structured by a boss, so why wasn’t I the boss of my own time?

The problem was, I wasn’t much of a planner beyond the “work vs. the rest of the day” comparison.

I started making time for the things that I didn’t put much effort into before. 5am wake-ups meant that I could “wake up” by 5:30am, be at the gym by 6, return home by 7:30, and then take my time getting ready for work by 9. I focused on eating healthy food that provided steady energy throughout the day so that I wasn’t completely zapped by 5:30pm when it was time to leave. This left me with about four hours to myself in the evening. I scheduled hangouts with friends at least twice a week. I taught myself how to cook. There was one evening when I spent those four hours shopping for new clothes because my jeans and t-shirts no longer fit (thanks, gym).

It took practice. The discipline came with time. There were moments of frustration when the timing didn’t come together, but I learned from it and just tried again another day. As it got easier, those evening hours slowed down. I didn’t feel rushed — everything had a time slot. It felt right.

I started setting longer goals. There were knitting projects (yes, knitting) that I had set aside for months or years because I had felt like there was no time for them. Creating something with your own hands is a satisfying experience, and I started working through my unfinished projects one by one whenever I watched TV. I realized I could squeeze in about 15 minutes for knitting on most mornings, too. Progress is progress, no matter how you measure it — if it helped me achieve the time goal I set for myself to complete something (for example, a week per project), it counted.

Most importantly, planning out my free time showed that I was fully capable of making time and space for all the things I needed, even if it had seemed overwhelming not too long ago.

Minimize the distractions

Phone notifications. Spotify playlist in the background. Opening and closing the same apps and browsers, waiting for something new. Anything to avoid what we’re actually supposed to be doing, right?

We do it without realizing most of the time. It probably doesn’t even seem like distraction — instead, the distractions are when someone interrupts our inner monologue during these times. Social media provides us with so much content that we could doomscroll nonstop and never finish it all (and in some ways, it seems like that’s the goal).

Distractions took up a lot of my workday. Partly because I wasn’t fulfilled professionally and found myself avoiding the work, but also because I was preoccupied with the habit of staying distracted. Something that should have taken maybe fifteen minutes to complete at work would be drawn out to an hour or longer. I was taking work home with me regularly and losing that “me” time I had worked for.

So, I changed my mindset. I started timeboxing my workday. It was more a mental battle than anything else as I unlearned the things that got in the way. I started putting my phone on “do not disturb” during work hours and kept it out of reach. I stopped working through breaks or lunches and gave myself 15 minutes every 2 hours to just stop and detach for a bit. Tasks were more digestible inside those 2-hour windows, and I pushed myself to finish everything on my list each day.

The amazing thing is, it worked. It really, really worked, so much so that I was able to speed through my list easily and have plenty of time to review things or take longer breaks. It floored me how much time I had been spending on “not work”. The list of things to accomplish each day wasn’t this mountain to climb anymore, and that rush of satisfaction that hits you when you realize that you got this is unlike anything else.

Take breaks

Speaking of breaks — take them. All of them. And not the “hang out in your work area” kind of break when you’re still thinking about work. Being able to detach and walk away for a moment is the reset button a lot of us need.

There are plenty of statistics out there about the ideal ratio of work time vs. breaks. For me, those 15 minutes every 2 hours was enough. If the weather was nice, I’d try to go outside or at least hang out by a window. It was great to do nothing — literally nothing — and I wished I had started sooner.

This taught me two things right away. First, it’s not easy to turn off your inner monologue. My mind was still used to revving up to “fill the silence”. Meditation never really was my thing, and I failed hard at spending breaks not thinking about work. I started bringing a book or magazine with me to breaks, just to keep my nose out of my phone (although I did set a phone alarm for the same time every day, just so I would also go to break at the same time). It kept me focused on something that wasn’t work, and with time I stopped reading during breaks because I didn’t need it anymore. I successfully stopped the inner monologue by training myself out of it, and I could finally just relax and enjoy some peace and quiet.

The second thing was that it’s equally as hard to step away from work and then pick it back up without a disconnect. This one took a lot more practice. I didn’t like stopping, let’s say, 10 minutes before my scheduled break and just taking it early. This just made me want to take longer breaks, and I would lose those 10 minutes (yep, I was that serious about it). The trick was to not just stop working, but look it over before you step away and set a mental reminder of what was next.

Again, practice eventually makes perfect. The more I did it, the more I realized that breaks actually give you the added bonus of clarity to your thought process. Mental blockers come and go throughout the day, but stepping away from something may be what you need to “reset”. Productivity needs room to breathe just like anything else.

Fast forward a few years. It hit me one day that the goal was actually never about losing time. Lightbulb moments have a way of catching you by surprise, and mine came during a dinner date. He asked me about my work (at the time I had a regular full-time job as well as a side job, plus I was taking a self-study course online for my own betterment), and after I put it all out there, he seemed impressed and said “wow, that sure sounds like a lot”.

It caught me off guard. Was it a lot? It didn’t feel that way. I must have given a strange look in response — his eyes opened wide and he immediately followed it with a quick “I mean, it’s not a bad thing, as long as you’re happy”.

That was it. A five-second interaction that made me see things differently. You don’t actually lose time — you invest it, sometimes without planning, sometimes in the wrong places. I had never actually reclaimed any time that wasn’t already there. I just learned how to manage it better.

When you start investing your time with purpose, it changes everything. I finally enjoyed what I was doing professionally. I had plenty of time for myself and for the things that mattered to me. Time management and I were thisclose, both at work and outside of it, and I prided myself in developing that skill set to the point that it came naturally, without much effort. There were times when these changes were definitely a labor of love, but it was a labor of love for myself and my own well-being. Nothing beats that.

Are you ready for change?