Unsubscribe, Unfollow, Unread, Unfriend, Unplug.

One thing I start­ed appre­ci­at­ing after becom­ing a dad is the val­ue of time.

Like many dads, being the best pos­si­ble hands on dad is non-nego­tiable to me. You don’t need a lot of mon­ey to be a good par­ent but you cer­tain­ly need a lot of time and patience, things mon­ey can’t buy. How­ev­er, this is not the only chal­lenge I have.

I am three decades into my life and still haven’t fig­ured what do I want to do with it. Thank­ful­ly I haven’t giv­en up and I refuse to set­tle. This means besides try­ing to be a good dad, I also need time to find my life’s pur­pose. While I do this, I need to make a liv­ing, exer­cise, learn to write well, run errands, form and keep up habit streaks; all while get­ting eight hours of sleep.

All these things put unprece­dent­ed pres­sure on my time. So ear­li­er last year I audit­ed how much free time I have and how am I spend­ing it. That’s when I real­ized a reliev­ing fact that I can still put time on the things I want to do and be there for my son.

These are some things I do to free up sig­nif­i­cant chunks of time.

Unsub­scribe to most of the RSS feeds. Google helped me a bit with this by killing the Read­er. Now I only read less than a third of my orig­i­nal feeds.

Unfol­low most of the tech celebri­ties, tech blogs, tech jour­nal­ists and every­body who spam. As a result, I brought down my twit­ter fol­low­ing count from few hun­dreds to under 50. This saves a lot of time I am oth­er­wise spend­ing to scroll through twit­ter time­line. Now I fol­low only a few inter­est­ing peo­ple.

Unfriend with Face­book friends with whom I am not in touch for years. It may sound weird but with how many of your 500+ Face­book friends did you attempt to make a gen­uine con­nec­tion? How many of them share their gen­uine thoughts on their feed? Most of them don’t. So I unfriend­ed with all but 30 peo­ple on Face­book so I don’t have to deal with their Far­mville requests and pas­sive shares.

Unread news. I only spend less than 15 min­utes to scroll through head­lines of two news­pa­per sites. The one I grew up read­ing and the oth­er, to get in touch with cur­rent affairs of the coun­try and city I live. I only occa­sion­al­ly read through the main con­tent. Most of it, most of the times is use­less any­way.

Unplug­ging is chal­leng­ing. Espe­cial­ly when tech­nol­o­gy is your pas­sion and you have a hand­ful of gad­gets around. I would be lying if I say I can unplug when I wish. But I am mak­ing slow progress. Dis­abling noti­fi­ca­tions in the iPhone is one thing that helped me with this.

Few years ago I always looked for­ward for the next Apple event and used to waste lot of time read­ing spec­u­la­tions in tech­nol­o­gy blogs about what Apple is going to release. Now I did not even know when was the last Apple event and what was it about.

There is always enough time for any­thing, but not for every­thing.