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" But you don&amp;#039;t have to constantly be time-strapped, if you learn to budget your hours. Think of your time as money \u2014 and any extra amount that you don&amp;#039;t give away can be spent on you! You can borrow time: While waiting in the doctor&amp;#039;s office, for instance, write your best friend a note. Or use time that you&amp;#039;ve &amp;quot;earned&amp;quot; from a canceled appointment to, say, give yourself a facial.  The key to finding your time wasters: Account for every minute by keeping a time-management journal for one week. As you fill it out, you&amp;#039;ll soon start to see how you spend your day, bad habits and all! If you notice lots of time-wasting patterns, use the following four steps to get back on track.  Allocate Your Energies Ask yourself, &amp;quot;What do I want more of in my life?&amp;quot; (More time at the gym or quality time with the kids, for instance?) Then think specifically about what you&amp;#039;d like less of (say, late nights at the office). This exercise will help you focus on what&amp;#039;s really important to you and recognize what&amp;#039;s not.   Set Daily Priorities A big problem for many of us is that we let others set our day-to-day goals, causing us to lose control of time. That&amp;#039;s why it&amp;#039;s so important to list your 10 daily priorities in order of importance, preferably at the end of every day for the following one so you don&amp;#039;t waste time thinking about them in the morning. Then work toward getting at least the top three completed by day&amp;#039;s end. As you go about your routine, keep your priorities foremost \u2014 and avoid interruptions by letting voice-mail pick up calls, for instance. What to do with the tasks you didn&amp;#039;t complete? Move them to the top of your to-do list the following day (assuming your priorities haven&amp;#039;t changed).   Avoid the Do-It-Yourself Trap Delegate projects that you don&amp;#039;t enjoy doing and that can be done more cost-effectively by someone else. Just be sure to give the right job to the appropriate person and set a deadline. If it&amp;#039;s a first-time task that you&amp;#039;re delegating to, say, a family member, offer some training and monitor the project&amp;#039;s progress (a reward at the end can&amp;#039;t hurt either!). If you suspect a task you&amp;#039;ve delegated isn&amp;#039;t moving along as planned, discuss the problem immediately \u2014 and before you feel you have to do the job yourself. Don&amp;#039;t have an extra pair of hands? Outsource. Patronize businesses that deliver, pay a store to build ready-to-assemble furniture and hire someone to clean your garage, file your taxes or mow your lawn. A recent study found that if you make more than $44,000 a year and hate working in the yard, you have a strong argument for hiring a lawn service. Keep a file handy with the contact names of timesaving services, so you can quickly grab it when you&amp;#039;re in a pinch.  Set Your Ways Develop personal systems and routines to save time. For example, find a &amp;quot;home&amp;quot; for everything and store like items together (for example, pens, stamps, labels, envelopes and a calculator where you pay your bills). This way, you can quickly complete recurring tasks. Also, establish times for dealing with the routines so they become automatic and you&amp;#039;re less likely to forget them. Pay bills the first of the month, do food shopping or the laundry only on Mondays and make standing hair-salon appointments. To save time shopping, buy in bulk and go during off-peak hours when stores are less crowded (or order over the Internet). Create a family grocery list, to which everyone adds items when you run low, not out. To avoid spending your weekends running errands, batch errands to coincide with your locations. Commit to this four-step plan, and you&amp;#039;ll soon have more time for yourself. Just be sure that when &amp;quot;your&amp;quot; hour approaches, you&amp;#039;ve turned off the phone and let the people around you know: &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t interrupt. This is my time.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/health/wellness/advice/a17324/budget-more-time-mar03/>