What if you had 40 more hours this week? What would you do with them? Would you tackle a big project? Get out on the golf course? Curl up with a good book? What if you had 40 more hours every week? Would you start a side hustle? Go back to school? Volunteer somewhere? What if those 40 hours were low-hanging fruit, hidden in plain sight? Would you grab them?

Who wouldn’t!

Read on and I’ll shine a light on where those hours are hiding and how you can claim them. The answer may surprise you!

Time keeps on slippin’ (…slippin’ …slippin’) into the future…

Some of us are old enough to remember these lyrics. If you don’t know them (or if you’re feeling a little nostalgic for the Steve Miller Band), you can give Fly Like an Eagle a listen while you’re reading this post.

The truth is, we’ve all had days (and for some, it’s most days!) when we get to the end of the day, look back, and think, “I’ve been going like crazy all day, and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten anything done!” Between getting yourself and a passel of small humans ready for the day and out the door in the morning, fighting traffic, jumping from meeting to meeting, putting out fires, answering emails, running errands, chauffeuring that same passel of small humans to the various places they need to go, feeding everybody, making sure homework gets done, and then picking up all the balls that dropped throughout your day, by the time you’re ready to take a moment for yourself and just breathe, it’s time to set the alarm, turn out the lights, and brace yourself to start the whole process all over again tomorrow. Whew, I’m exhausted just writing that!

There’s no way there are 40 more hours hidden in there. I can’t find even one!

Actually, there are. You know those times when you’re feeling totally overwhelmed and you just need to take a break for a minute? You just need to turn the temperature of your mind down a little bit and clear your head by distracting it with something else? What do you do? I’m willing to bet that you do the same thing that nearly every other person reading this blog post does and has been doing since 2007 when Apple first launched its shiny, new, pocket gadget: you reach for your phone.

Think that screen time doesn’t add up? Research shows otherwise. Recent studies have found that adults age 25-65 spend over six hours each day on the internet, primarily on their phones and mobile devices. More than two of those six hours are spent on social media. But wait, there’s more! Those same studies found that adults in that same age group spend over three hours each day watching television. And another study found that 22% of adults age 20-39 and 17% of adults age 40-59 spend 6-10 hours per week playing video games, while a whopping 27% of adults age 20-39 and 20% of adults age 40-59 spend anywhere from eleven to more than twenty hours per week playing video games.

Let’s be conservative and assume that you’re on the low end of all that. Let’s assume that you spend two hours a day on social media, three hours a day watching TV, one hour a day on the internet, and zero hours a day on gaming. You know what all that adds up to? 42 hours per week. Every single week!

But I need social media for work and to keep up with my friends! And I’m not ditching TV.

You absolutely do not need to give up social media, TV, the internet, or even video games to take back your time. In fact, a recent study found that most people who go on a “digital detox” end up abandoning the process prematurely or rebounding to previous patterns of excessive use after their detox has ended. Even those who successfully detox do so for a period of time to reset their boundaries, but then return to screens in some capacity when their digital detox has ended. Screens are just too much a part of our daily lives, our productivity, our communication, and our preferred entertainment to forego them altogether.

So, what can we do to harvest those screen-related hours if we don’t actually give up screen-based activities? I’m glad you asked!

The Five “A”s of Reclaiming up to 40 Hours a Week Without Giving Up Screens

The key to harvesting those hidden hours is being intentional about stewarding your time through awareness, alternatives, arrangement, alignment, and appointment. Here’s how it works:

Step 1. Awareness

Peter Drucker famously said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” So the first step to stewarding your time is to take an honest inventory of how you spend your time. You can start with just one thing: the time you spend on screens. Take a typical seven-day week and keep track of the following:

• How much time did I spend on social media?
• How much time did I spend watching TV?
• How much time did I spend playing video games?
• How much time did I spend on the internet that wasn’t directly related to work, school, or other responsibilities?
• How many times did I check my phone? (This one is especially important. You’ll see why in a minute.)

Try not to “be good” or behave any differently than you normally do. You want to get an honest measurement of where your time is actually going in a typical week.

Step 2. Alternatives

Start creating an inventory of the types of things you would do with more time if you had it. No idea is too big or too small. Go ahead, dream! Imagine! You can continue to add to your list as you think of more ideas. As examples, here are four items from my own list of things that I would do with more time: develop more consistent exercise habits, organize my bookshelves, nurture my relationships with my friends, and hike the entire Appalachian Trail.

Step 3. Arrangement

Now, arrange your ideas according to both priority and the amount of time you would need to invest to make each idea meaningful. Using my examples above, a high priority item for me that can be accomplished in bite-sized pieces is nurturing my relationships with my friends. A high priority item that will require bigger blocks of time is developing more consistent exercise habits. A low priority item that wouldn’t require much time is organizing my bookshelves. A low priority item that sounds amazing but would consume a great amount of time is hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.

Step 4. Alignment

Next, think about how you utilize your screen time currently. Do you use it for work? Staying in touch with friends? Keeping up to date on news and current events? Relaxing and unwinding? Now, compare your current screen use to the list you made in steps two and three. Which of the things from steps two and three could you substitute for something you currently do with screen time in order to accomplish the same purpose? Which items on your list could be done simultaneously with screen time to double-up your use of that time? Start with your highest priority items, and be specific.

An example of substitution of a high priority item from my own list would be repurposing some of the time I currently spend scrolling through social media to reach out directly to one friend each day just to tell them that I’m thinking about them. An example of doubling up a high priority item from my own list would be walking on the treadmill while watching television for 45 minutes four days each week to develop more consistent exercise habits without carving out any additional time.

Step 5. Appointment

This is the biggest one of all: schedule your screen time. When will I be on which screens, and for how long? Will I spend 30 minutes on LinkedIn and 30 minutes on Facebook? Or do I prefer to spend 20 minutes on YouTube, 20 minutes on Instagram, and 20 minutes on TikTok? Will I spend 2 hours watching television, or would I rather spend 1 hour watching television and 1 hour playing video games? What’s most important to me during my screen time? Do I want to prioritize interacting with my friends, keeping up with the latest episodes of my shows, or following my favorite sports teams?

Setting healthy boundaries around the time we spend on screens and prioritizing with purpose can free up hours of time spent on mindless scrolling, watching shows that don’t add much to our life, or perfecting skills that have little usefulness outside of the online gaming environment.

But there’s another huge benefit to scheduling our screen time, and this is where the real hidden hours are found. This will likely be the single most impactful treasure trove of time that you can regain: time lost due to task-switching.

Scheduling screen time can return as much as 40% of productive time lost to task-switching.

“Task-switching” is defined as the voluntary or involuntary interruption of one task in order to pay attention to another task. One study reports that even brief mental blocks created by switching between tasks can quietly steal as much as 40 percent of a person’s productive time.

What does this have to do with screen time? Another recent study found that Americans check their mobile devices an average of 205 times per day, or roughly every five minutes during waking hours. That’s 205 task switches from what you were doing to look at your phone, and 205 more task switches from looking at your phone back to what you were previously doing, resulting in a total of 410 task switches per day just from checking your phone.

Research has established that regaining focus after a task switch takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds. Now, I can see how this could reasonably be the case when switching from one project to another, but 23 minutes seems way out of whack to me for just checking your phone. So let’s make some assumptions. Let’s assume that checking your phone isn’t a major task switch, it’s just a minor, distraction-type task switch. Let’s also assume that you are exceptional, and that it takes you just one minute to task switch in each direction. Now, let’s do that math: 410 switches times one minute per switch is 6 hours and 50 minutes per day. Multiply that by seven days, and you have 47 hours and 50 minutes each week that is consumed by task-switching alone, just from checking your phone!

Here’s how to mine that treasure: What if you scheduled your time and disciplined yourself to check your mobile devices only two times per waking hour? Assuming you prioritize the recommended 7.5 hours of sleep per night, that means you will check your phone 33 times each day. That’s 66 minutes of task-switching per day (one minute each way). 66 minutes times 7 days is 7 hours and 42 minutes per week. Subtract that from 47 hours and 50 minutes, and that leaves you with forty hours and 8 minutes saved per week, just from being intentional about how often you check your phone!

But I don’t task-switch. I multitask.

Ah, multitasking… Did you know that multitasking is actually a myth? Everyone likes to list that word as a skill on their résumé, but no one is actually capable of doing it, because the human brain simply doesn’t function that way. The NeuroLeadership Institute cites numerous studies that have found that the human brain is simply not wired to complete more than one cognitive task at a time. What we think of as “multitasking” is actually the brain switching back and forth rapidly between two or more competing tasks. The resulting delay is known as a “switch cost,” which occurs because the brain must first store information related to the abandoned task for future access and then redirect its attention to the new task. The more we task-switch, the faster we get at it, and those of us who get really fast at it call that “multitasking.” However, what we fail to recognize is that the stress that task-switching tolls on the brain leads to cognitive fatigue and increased errors that ultimately make even the best “multitasker” less productive overall.

I’m different. I’m not one of those people who spends that much time on screens or constantly checks my phone.

Okay. Let’s say you’re not that into social media, you don’t watch a lot of TV, you don’t spend much time on the internet, you don’t play video games, and you leave your phone out of sight and out of mind most of the time. Let’s say you barely save any of those 40 hours. Maybe you only save 10%. That’s just four hours a week.

What could you do with just four more hours a week? What if you took 20 minutes of quiet time for yourself every single day, six days a week, and on the seventh day, you took two whole luxurious hours, just for you? What would that mean for your life? Would it be worth it? You decide. If it would, then I challenge you to go through the five “A”s. Ask God to guide you as you start with awareness of how you currently spend your time. Then list your imagined alternatives, arrange those alternatives according to your priorities, align those alternatives with your current activities and eliminate redundancy, then schedule intentional appointments that honor your priorities. If you do that, don’t be surprised if God blesses you with a whole lot more than just four more hours each week!

If you’d like help with the five “A”s of mining for hidden time in your own life, I encourage you to check out my coaching page or connect with me directly. I’d love to walk with you!