Free yourself up

Time is the most valuable thing in life. Regardless if you're rich or poor, smart or dumb you only have one life. We only have a certain number of days, hours, minutes and seconds to live. We have to make the most of it.

We have to work in order to sustain our livelihood. Part of your work is enjoyable and other parts are repetitive and time wasters. Ideation, sketching, illustration and such tasks are source of joy for me in my work, but certain other tasks like organizing information, technical updates, bugfixing, billing, etc. are boring and I consider them necessary evil.

In order to optimize the day for more fun and play and less slavery one needs to continuously strive to automate and simplify tasks that doesn't bring you joy. This is an overall mindset that brings results over time and makes you eventually much more productive resulting in more free time for yourself.

People who saw the many projects I work on ask me how can I possibly do it. There is no magic in becoming more productive. There is no single solution, but hundreds of small things that all add up freeing up minutes and later hours in a day.

You should not try to make big modifications in your schedule at once. Allow yourself to get used to the change. It's virtually impossible to create a list of areas where you can apply time saving changes, because everybody's work and schedule is different. You have to carefully examine your routine to find areas that allow for small optimizations. I will however try to give some initial ideas that you can start working on:

Be an early bird

Try to get to the office early when people are not yet buzzing around you. This will allow you to be more productive at the time when your energy levels are the highest. I find myself getting done more from 8-10 than the rest of the day altogether.

Save on travel

Think about how can you save time on traveling to and from work or any other travel that your daily schedule may require. Can you get a vehicle to speed up your commute? Or rather, can you take public transportation and use the time to get stuff done on the way? Can you work from home for one day a week perhaps?

Organize your data

Sharing and duplicating data is a painstaking, repetitive and error prone task. Try to secure a system with a single location for your work files. You can use google apps or zoho to store your documents and email accessible online from anywhere and with easy sharing options. For your large files you can setup an automated system of backup like dropbox or jungle disk.

Get a to-do-list

Managing and remembering your to-dos is a huge and daunting task. Make sure you have a system to be able to store your incoming data into easy to organize to-do lists or if you need you can implement a project management solution, such as basecamp or the free project pier.

Get fast hardware

A faster computer will save valuable minutes and lot of frustration. You can speed up your computer by putting in a faster hard drive and maxing out the RAM. These are low cost and very effective ways to improve speeds.

Get a bigger or second screen

Moving or switching windows is a huge time waster that you don't even realize until you get a bigger screen. Nowadays you can buy a large screen that isn't very good in quality, but can hold your mail, chat, palettes and other secondary data for cheap.

Get faster internet

If you can afford get the fastest internet as soon as you can. You will literally save minutes every hour by not having to wait for videos or google spreadsheets to load. Also, by implementing a file sync system you will need the fastest internet you can get.

Set up a proper home office

If you have a quiet and comfortable space to work from home you can get many tasks done if you have a small window of free time at home. It also allows you to work effectively from home, so you don't necessarily need to go to work every day.

Get a mobile device

Turn your otherwise wasted and frustrating waiting times at the doctor, in the cab, or at your in-laws visit to something useful. With iPhone or a Blackberry you can get 90% of your emailing done without the need to focus on these tasks when you're at your desk.

Automate your workflow

Examine your workflow in detail and find points where you can automate repetitive tasks. These can be as simple as creating a Photoshop action to resize and save images for your blog or creating a Transmit droplet that uploads images to your server. But they can be complicated things that require a custom Automator application, but will run a whole series of tasks at a press of a button. Depending on the type of work you do these automations can save up to 30% of your work time.

Automate your web activities

We all spend a lot of time on the web with small things that eventually eat up a lot of our time. You can set-up automatic refill of your payed services, such as domain registrations, Skype credits or credit card payments to save time on these repetitive tasks. You can also optimize small tasks such as updating your Facebook status from your Twitter account automatically.

Finally: Outsource or delegate

If you have the resources or authority try to delegate tasks that can be done by other people with your supervision to others. Try to save yourself for the tasks that others can't do and let others do things that you do not enjoy that much.

While each of these do not account as much individually, if you combine them you will save literally hours every day.

Please feel free to add any other suggestion if you have.