7 Easy One-Minute Habits That Save Me 2+ Hours Daily
Use these techniques to crush your to-do list
What if it took 60 seconds to optimize your schedule?
Imagine your day organized in a way that feels manageable.
To-do lists
Important work tasks
Gym routine
Dinner plans
Chances are you’re not as busy as you think. The sooner you accept that the sooner you can take control of your time. But if you’re pressed for time, you don’t need David Goggins’ morning routine to optimize yourself.
Try these one-minute techniques to maximize your calendar.
Check your bank account first thing
I got this tip from the legend Alex Hormozi.
He says to open your banking app as soon as you wake up:
Not after scrolling TikTok
Not after making your bed
Not after brewing your coffee
If you look at your account daily, you learn about your money flow and recognize your spending habits.
This habit saves hours for budget-making because it gives you a general idea of how much you spend and what your monthly bills are.
Make your damn bed
I’m not your mom, but a neat bed is a small win.
And what an easy win it is — all you have to do is get out of bed, straighten the sheets, and put pillows where they belong.
A small win in the morning sets the tone for the day, making it easier to collect other small wins at work and the gym.
Clean bed
Successful meeting
Solid leg day at the gym
Emails read and responded to
Progress on a project due Friday
Your bed is a part of your environment. A cluttered environment sinks into a chaotic schedule. A clean bed plays a small but significant role in an efficient one.
So one minute of making the bed can save you hours.
If you like this, then you’ll love the digital time blocker I created.
Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE?
Drink water before coffee
I try to drink two glasses of water in the morning.
My friends think I’m crazy. I say I’m hydrated.
Drinking water gets your metabolism going, helping your body utilize the caffeine in your coffee more efficiently. So water is the primary driver of your morning focus.
Water = energy
Use two-word affirmations
“Leadership Two Words at a Time” by Bill Treasurer explores the principles of leadership through the lens of two-word phrases.
He uses simple yet powerful phrases to help people improve their leadership skills. The reason these are so powerful lies in their simplicity.
It’s easy as heck to remember two words.
They also take less than five seconds to say to yourself three times fast, making them crazy efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule.
Here are some two-word phrases I say to myself daily:
Solve problems
Create solutions
Calm confidence
Always smile
Adaptive mindset
Proactive thinking
Next time you feel pressed for time or stressed during a meeting, center yourself and remind yourself who you are.
Delete TikTok
Create content, don’t just consume it.
TikTok became a problem for me last year. Like any addiction, it slowly infested my mind, made it harder to sleep, and distracted me during work hours.
So I took 60 seconds to pull out my phone and delete the app entirely.
But I still redownload on Fridays.
So now it’s a habit I delete the app every Sunday afternoon, and I get more sleep and am less distracted at work, knowing my phone won’t give me an instant serotonin boost.
The next step is deleting all my social apps weekly.
Organize your workspace
Deep cleaning takes hours. It takes 60 seconds to organize.
I’ve been there. It’s Monday morning; you have five meetings on your agenda, each a half hour to one hour long. You sit in your cozy chair, racking up empty bowls and post-it notes on your desk.
It quickly becomes a trash pile; instead of throwing anything away, you leave it there.
I like to employ the “if it takes less than a minute to do, just do it” technique. It speaks for itself; you have to tell yourself that next time you don’t want to do something.
Ask, “will this take a minute or less?” If the answer is yes, do it.
This goes beyond desk cleaning too. Think of a task that takes less than 60 seconds to complete, and do it.
Time block your day
This is the most powerful habit I added to my arsenal in 2022.
Time blocking is like writing in a daily planner, except you write down what you’re going to do and exactly when you will do it.
Daily planners cause analysis paralysis. They list your tasks.
When you’re faced with too many “to-dos,” you become overwhelmed and unable to take action. This often results in procrastination and a feeling of being stuck.
I overcame analysis paralysis by prioritizing my tasks in a time-blocker, which made an insane difference in my productivity.
I even made a digital time blocker to track all of my projects.