I tried to analyze when I have the “longest” days in my life and I found out that my days are longer when I do or learn something new. I remember when I went camping for the first time. One week seemed to be a month for me because every day was filled with new experience, new emotions and knowledge. I lived in the present, with complete awareness of the moment, not thinking about tomorrow or yesterday. So here is rule #1 that I made for myself:

Try as many new things as possible during the day, week, month or a year

Try to take a new route to work, find a new game to play with your kids, change your morning routine or think of a new way to spend your weekends.

Do you ever stop in the middle of the day thinking ‘Did I brush my teeth in the morning?’ or ‘How did I do this or that, I don’t remember’. I do, I sometimes feel so stupid because I do some things so routinely that I can’t even remember if I did it or not a few hours later. So here comes rule #2

Change your routines frequently

With two little babies my husband and I have our hands full. Some days our girls are behaving really well and let us get our things done, but sometimes they have these bad days when we can’t do anything at all except taking care of them. A few days like this in a row can be quite frustrating and sometimes I completely lose control over my time and life and can’t do anything at all. I could not help feeling bad about wasting so much time and not accomplishing anything until I discovered rule #3

If circumstances do not allow you to do anything, stop worrying about it, go to bed, have a nice rest and start the next day fresh and full of energy

Very often I catch myself thinking about what I should start doing instead of just doing it. Some tasks seem to be too difficult to perform right now. Some tasks are not very important or something just does not go right and that is why I prefer to leave it for later, or something will take too long so I don’t even want to try it. So here we have the worst of the time killers, procrastination. After a day like this I feel that the day ran away from me and I didn’t have time to do anything at all. So here comes an extremely important rule #4

Stop procrastinating and start acting

To-do lists are as old as dirt and mentioning them is the same as not saying anything new at all. However I would still like to refer to them as they are one of the most powerful tools in controlling your time. I write a weekly list and set priorities for the tasks that need to be done on some particular day. A weekly to-do list gives me some flexibility allowing me to have less productive and more productive days without feeling bad about it. It’s so great to look at my list at the end of the week and see how much I have done. My rule #5 says

Always use to-do lists

As I’ve already mentioned to-do lists are so trivial and boring that everybody is probably sick of them. This is the reason why I try to keep my to-dos fresh and creative. Instead of writing down only important tasks like business calls, important work projects and grocery lists I add some fun and enjoyable stuff to my lists. On my list you will notice things like “Get a pedicure”, “Go to the movies with my husband” or “Chat on the phone with my best friend”. Accomplishing these tasks is as important as getting some serious things done and if you have them on your list then at the end of the week you will feel that you were always in control of your time. And that is why you accomplished so much this week. Rule #6 states

Keep your to-dos creative and add some enjoyable tasks to them

Do you keep your stuff organized? Do you organize your things weekly? Do you think it’s important to spend a few hours a week cleaning out your desk, organizing your papers and getting rid of the clutter? If you answered yes to all these questions then you obviously can skip rule #7, if you didn’t then keep on reading. Why is it important to organize your work space, to get rid of the clutter and to keep your things in order? Let’s imagine that you need to write a check to pay one of your never ending bills. It does not sound complicated at all, so you start looking for your check-book (you remember that you put it in a safe place last month, but which one???) and after spending about 30 minutes pulling your house apart searching for it you finally find it in your car. Then you need a pen and it turns out that all those pens that you always find in the most unthinkable places are in a conspiracy against you and today all of them decided to stop writing. After wasting about an hour of your time you have not accomplished anything and you feel worn out and irritated. Here is the moral of this long story: follow rule #7

Keep all your things organized. Spend a few hours every week organizing your mail, getting rid of the clutter and cleaning your working space

Very often we do things that we don’t really like and don’t really need to be doing. These activities can be different for each of us, so I’ll give a few examples from my own life: watching TV, keeping in touch with people I don’t like and don’t need, checking your email a hundred times a day and surfing the web without any purpose, chatting with people online instead of doing my work, and listening to an hour-long monologue of my colleague about her attempt to find a proper dress for her friend’s birthday. The best way to find activities that are not important to you is to keep a diary of all your activities (a day log) during the week. At the end of the week look at everything that you’ve been doing during this period of time and follow rule #8:

Eliminate all activities that are not important

Sometimes I feel that the time that I spend for myself is actually a waste of time as I don’t do anything productive. It took me a long while to realize that I need time for myself as well as time for my family and my work. This time can be spent reading my favorite book or magazine, taking a nice long bath, indulging into some female joys, going to the gym (that’s a really big one), going to the art gallery or creating a colorful collage for the nursery. If I decide that every day I have an hour for myself then I don’t feel that this time simply ran away from me. Rule #9 states

Set aside time for yourself and enjoy this time

The last but not the least important rule is to realize that time just is and we can’t change it in any way. How many times I wished I had a few more hours in the day so I could finish up everything that I had on my mind. Thinking about it didn’t make me accomplish more and didn’t make me feel any better. I actually felt much worse because I knew that I had no control over time that is why my rule #10 is

Realize that you cannot change time; you can only change your perception of time