How do you build a bicycle lane on busy city streets?
If you ask someone at the local council how to build a bicycle lane on a busy street, the answer is usually quite complicated.
There will be talk of consultations, resource consents, engineering reports and budgets. Eventually, after years of planning and several million dollars, a narrow strip of space might be carved out of an already crowded road.
Yet sometimes the solution may be much simpler.
Many busy streets already contain unused space. Not unused in the strict sense, but space that is occupied by parked cars along the side of the road. If that parking were reduced or removed, the space could often accommodate a bicycle lane without significantly changing the structure of the road itself.
Cars understandably need access to the roadway, but roadside parking is often a matter of policy rather than necessity. Reconsidering how that space is used may open up possibilities that are quicker, cheaper, and easier to implement.
In some cases, the challenge of creating a bicycle lane is not about building something new.
It may simply involve reallocating space that already exists.
Finding time works similarly.
We often feel overwhelmed and believe we lack the time to learn something new. We imagine some magical solution will magically appear and grant us extra time. However, what if the time already exists? What if we’re not utilising our current abilities to their fullest potential? Let’s explore how you can create additional time – for learning and perhaps even some leisure.
Here are three steps that I take:
Method 1: Stacking activities.
Method 2: Eliminating unnecessary time leaks
Method 3: Avoiding the sluggish keyboard.
Method 1: Stacking activities.
Most people I know believe in the future. People often talk about the future as though it’s a real place. They say things like:
– I will write a book in the future.
– I will start a magazine someday.
– I will work on the garden later.
But the future never truly arrives.
By the time it gets here, it has already become the present. Everything we do must be done now, and that creates a huge dilemma: How do we act now when we feel we have no time? The first method I use, you’re probably already aware of and it's called stacking activities.
Stacking literally means doing two things at the same time. In other words, pairing activities together, which means that you could be listening to podcasts or audiobooks while walking or doing routine tasks while learning a language.
On any given day, Renuka and I go for a walk, and at a specific point during the walk I break away and switch on my audio. It's not like I’m stuck in my own world for the entire journey. Instead, I use a trigger point about one-third of the way back, and that gives me about ten minutes first thing in the morning. Then, as I'm making breakfast, which takes another 15 or 20 minutes, I get another batch of time.
And so it is during most of the day, whether I'm standing in a line at the supermarket or just waiting for the dentist, where I can stack two activities at once.
However, there are limits to stacking.
At one point I overdid it: I wore earbuds constantly until my ears became so sore I had to stop using them for five or six months. Renuka also pointed out that I seemed to be permanently plugged in.Experiences like this force us to rebalance and develop a slightly different strategy.
Sometimes walking should stay about walking, and at other times blasting music in the car is my default mode. However, stacking activities and doing two things at once has helped generate a huge volume of information I can use in my business as well as when writing articles, creating podcasts, and more.
This method of stacking is adding on something, but what if we're using up time needlessly? This takes us to the second method: eliminating time leaks.
Method 2: Eliminating Time Leaks
When I was very young, I was exposed to the prospect of war between India and Pakistan.
I use the phrase “prospect of war” because where I lived in Bombay, now called Mumbai, there was no real action. The Pakistani air force did enter Indian airspace but never reached Bombay.
Nonetheless, people were terrified. If they believed that planes were flying overhead, they would run helter-skelter down the lanes, insisting that people turn off their lights so that we couldn't be located. Nonetheless, fear was the constant issue despite being located far from the front line or even air-raids of any kind.
I think that fear still exists when war shows up.
As the current set of battles ramped up in the Middle East, I found myself bouncing incessantly between different websites. These were some international news websites as well as local news sites to see how it was affecting us in New Zealand. However, even spending ten minutes per site quickly turned to about forty to sixty minutes every single day. The uncertainty alone created an impulse to constantly check the news.
I decided to use the impulse to my advantage.
Whenever I felt the impulse to check on a developing situation, I would do something else instead.
I redirected that impulse to my benefit. Instead of news, I started listening to a Spanish podcast about Maradona, and I finished a podcast that had sat incomplete for months. I used the same urge to push forward in projects like my magazine, Untouristy.
Rather than reading news sites, I redirected it toward something more useful.
I'm not saying you should avoid news entirely; some awareness of world events is necessary. However, channeling that impulse reduced time leaks, and I could spend time painting, going to the cafe, or doing something without feeling like I was running out of time every day.
All of us have some sort of time leak.
The time leak is never dramatic. It doesn’t take up an hour or two in the day. It doesn’t seem like a big hole in the ground. Instead, it’s a very small problem, like a tap that never fully closes. A few minutes here and there, and suddenly we have lost quite a lot of time every single day.
For some people, the leak is the news; for others, it might be social media, and each visit feels harmless because it only lasts a few minutes. If you look for the time leak, you can close that tab and do so within a very short period.
Time leaks are different for everyone, but they share one common feature: they hide in plain sight. The moment you identify them, you find that there is a surprising amount of time that can quite easily be reclaimed on a daily basis.
This takes us to our third point: avoiding the sluggish keyboard.
Method 3: Avoiding the sluggish keyboard.
My father is 90 years old, and he wants to write about his life. Guess what tool he's using?
Yes, he's using a keyboard, and he's doing so on his phone. It's kind of ironic that he is reduced to slowing down so much because he once ran a secretarial college. At that college, he taught shorthand and typing, and his speed ranged from 60-100 words per minute. Now he is reduced to roughly 20 to 30 words a minute.
Most of us spend our time at keyboards, operating at only one-fifth of our potential.
With dictation software, you can easily reach between 90-115 words per minute. This means you are going 500% faster than everybody else, and you’re not wasting enormous time fiddling around with your keyboard. It doesn’t matter whether you are using a keyboard at your desk or are excellent at typing. You'll simply be slower. Using keyboards across messaging, email, and the dozens of apps we use every day wastes an enormous amount of time for no good reason.
During courses, I provide extensive feedback to clients.
It can be as long as a paragraph, sometimes longer. I detail what I liked, what needs improvement, and where they can make fixes. If you average about five minutes per client and have 20 clients, the math is simple. That’s well over two hours of typing. What we overlook when we say “typing” is the fatigue factor.
When I first start out, I can think clearly and type faster because I’m not so tired.
If I continued that journey, I would soon become extremely tired. Two hours of typing for any reason will weigh you down considerably. Personally, I also had another issue: I needed to wear spectacles, and since it was a new habit, I wouldn’t wear them as often.
Naturally, I started making typos. In the past, these errors would not have slipped by me; everything I did slowed down. Was the client getting a better output? I don’t think so. It’s not just my client, but pretty much everyone we deal with who gets different versions of us, the fresh version and the tired version. That is because we spend so much time on these mini-keyboards on our phones and on the mega-keyboards on our computers.
When I started using dictation software, I could do the same amount of work in a fraction of the time. I delivered the same amount of work, but with far more detailed and precise feedback. I finished in half an hour instead of two, and clients received better responses.
The biggest objection I hear is that people can’t dictate accurately without making mistakes.
The software I’m referring to lets you speak the way you would to someone in a café. You can speak at any speed, and it will recognise your accent. The software has no problem inserting all the punctuation and grammar, and it does one more thing. In the software I use, there’s a tool called the Transform tool. When we speak, we often pause, stutter, circle around, and sentences aren’t quite complete. Sometimes we use the word “in” instead of “at.”
We tend to make these speech mistakes in casual conversation.
However, the transform tool fixes these errors with a single keyboard shortcut. It takes your words and tidies them up without changing their meaning. In fact, it makes them slightly superior, like what most AI does these days, which also reduces editing time.
I did ask my father whether he would like me to help him with this software.
He could write his life stories, and he would even have a hands-on editor while he was doing so. I was quite sad when he said that he had to think about it. I was sad not just for him but for everybody else reading this article, because for a small fee, you can save an enormous amount of time every day instead of pounding at the keyboard.
Now that the technology exists and works far better and faster than anything you’ve used before, we will continue to use the keyboard. The keyboard is a useful tool, but in 70–80% of cases, you can simply dictate your answer accurately at five times the speed.
Will you do it? That’s the question.
If you want to make additional time out of thin air, you can drop the first two activities because they do require work. You might not want to stack activities together. You might just enjoy your walk and not want to listen to a podcast or a book. Maybe things like the news really interest you, and you’re not willing to give that up. Maybe social media or Netflix is what is important to you; however, nobody will go to their grave saying, nobody will go to their grave saying, “I wish I had spent more time with my keyboard.”
Here's the link to the software.
It works on Android as well as the iOS system, and if you use the link, you get a free month. So do I.
Try this. I've been using it for messages and for lots of other work. It's far, far superior than anything you're likely to use, and makes no mistakes.
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