How To Find A Minimum Of 10 Hours Per Week To Further Develop Yourself

5 min readAug 6, 2018

Over the past several years, I have attended many seminars, training programs and enrolled in numerous online training courses.

While the experience of attending live events were great, finding time to implement or apply the ideas I learned were always challenging. The same is true for online training programs as there can literally be tens, if not hundreds of hours worth of content to go through.

In recent times, I’ve gotten better at using my time more productively which has given me the opportunity to read more books and acquire new skills such as website creation skills, leadership and coaching skills and online marketing strategies.

I’ve invested thousands of hours improving my current skills and learning new things. With more and more information now being offered via online training programs, one of the challenges we all face is to find the time to actually complete those programs.

Here are a few ways I’ve saved time during a typical week in order to be able to commit to further learning.

1. Get up an hour early. This is by far my favourite way to find additional time. Just doing something so simple like getting up early compounds over time. That hour can be spent reading, listening to an audio program or watching a video. Over the course of a week, this will give us an additional 5 hours.

2. Stop listening to the radio or music during travel. Instead, listen to an educational program. I wish I had applied this strategy when I used to travel for work many years ago. The last company I worked for, I travelled up to an hour per day, five days per week, for seven years. Think about all the hours I wasted listening to meaningless radio shows or music.

That roughly works out to be 1750 hours over the course of seven years, which is equivalent to forty-three, 40-hour working weeks. Oh, that hurts!

I could have done so much more had I been more intelligent back then. However, I now know better. Okay, let’s say you only travel 30 minutes per day, that adds up to 2.5 hours per week. We’re up to 7.5 hours so far. And by the way, if you travel longer per day, you will be saving even more time but let’s keep it simple for now.

3. Listen to an audio program while exercising. This could be a challenging one as people do prefer to listen to the favourite music while exercising. However, if you’re prepared to make a little sacrifice, and say you do 30-minutes of exercise, five times per week, that will give you an additional 2.5 hours.

Now, we’re up to 10 hours for the week. Yay! We’ve achieved our goal. But, let’s not stop there. Here are a couple more ways just in case you miss a day or two.

4. Listen to an audio program or watch a video during cooking. I remember for many years, I had the habit of turning on the television and watching the news while cooking. That did not serve me at all as the news is typically negative news.

Now, I prefer to listen to an audio program on my phone or I’ll watch an online video on my tablet. If you spend up to 30 minutes per day cooking, that will add an additional 2.5 hours per week. Okay, we’re up to 12.5 hours so far.

5. Cut out one hour of television per day. I believe the average adult watches up to three hours of television per day. I think that is being conservative. Television has often been referred to as the income reduction box.

Over the years, I have steadily reduced the amount of television I watch and now, I hardly watch more than an hour of television per day. By cutting out one hour of television per day, you have now gained an extra five hours per week.

That adds up to a total of 17.5 hours per week. Imagine all the things you could do with an extra 17.5 hours per week. That’s an extra two working days per week (based on an eight-hour day). If you added a few hours over the weekend for study and further development, you can easily reach over 20 hours per week.

That’s over 1,000 hours per year to either learn a new skill, complete an educational course or invest in creating products or services of your own.

Investing 10 to 20 hours per week in your own development will make a radical difference to the results you achieve over time and the quality of your life.

If you’ve been using the excuse of not having enough time to do some of the things you want to, now you have a few ideas that can help find you the time to do those things. No more excuses!

Question: What are some additional ways you can apply to save time during the week?

You can leave a comment by clicking here.