The key to gaining more hours in your day requires using your “deadtime” effectively by combining the activities that do not engage your mind with activities that do.

The rules of time are familiar to all; we have 24 hours in the day, 7 days in the week, 365 days in the year…no more no less, and it’s the same for everyone. (leap year ignored).

…Of course that statement presumes everyone is playing by the rules…and rules are made to be broken.

The rules of time

How much time you have in the day is really just a point of perspective, most people have 24 hours but it is possible to pull off 30-32 hour days. It’s all down to how you view time and how you use your “dead time”.

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Dead time: an introduction.

Dead time is all the minutes in the day where your mind isn’t actively engaged on a specific task. Activities that fall into this category include falling to sleep, eating, brushing teeth, the gym, running, getting the bus/driving to work, cleaning, getting changed, washing up etc.

Take a moment to calculate the average amount of dead time you have during the day. For myself the day usually looks like this:

Getting ready in the morning: 30

Running to work: 30

Eating: 90

Gym: 60

Running back from work: 30

Cooking: 30

Houshold tasks (cleaning, washing): 30

Preparing for bed: 30

Falling asleep: 30

Total: 6 hours. That’s 6 hours extra I can add to my day or, put another way, it’s 30 hours in any working week, 120 a month, or 1440 a year, and that’s not including weekends. That’s almost as much time as I spend in the office.

The trick to getting the most out of your deadtime.

The trick to bending the rules of time involves combining the activities where your mind is not engaged with activities that do engage you mind. Principally this is easiest done in the pursuit of learning, which is the single most important thing you can do to continually improve your options in life.

You can become an expert in almost anything, in a relatively short period of time, as long as you are constantly absorbing information on that subject. Whether business, finance, design, comedy, world events, entrepreneurship, languages, teaching, charity, lifehacking, sports, literature or any other possible topic you wish to learn, an extra 30 hours a week is more than enough time to become an expert in any given subject within a year.

The beauty of our minds and how they function means that most of our learning is not on a conscious level, but on a subconscious level. In laymen terms; you don’t have to be fully concentrating on the words for your mind to be absorbing the information.

Over time you will find your knowledge of the subjects you are constantly engaged with will increase as will your understanding of the subject matter. This understanding of the subject matter is of greater practical use to you then just being able to regurgitate facts. You will find that your acquired knowledge and understanding starts flowing out naturally in conversation and practice as mental links to information you absorb are created in the pathways of your mind.

I know this to be true through my own experience, and having spent the last few years following this approach, I now find myself recalling information on all the topics that interest me on a daily basis.

The humble mp3 player – the world’s greatest teacher.

The easiest way to begin is to invest in an mp3 player and get yourself into podcast’s and audio books. Below are some great resources to get you started.

Some great free resources:

Bbc.com/podcasts

Digg.com/podcasts

Itunes Podcasts section

Podiobooks.com

Some great commercial resources:

Audible.com

One sentence conclusion

Make better use of your dead time in order to get yourself ahead.

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