Bored? 5 Productive Ways to Kill Time

*This is a sponsored post, all opinions are my own.

A break amidst the hustle and bustle of everyday life is more often than not incredibly desirable. You can curl up on your comfortable Nectar mattress, grab your laptop, and kill the hours playing online casino games or online computer games. However, every once in a while, you end up faced with more free time than you know what to do this. This gift of time can be incredibly easy to waste, but if you do waste this time, you will be mad with yourself tomorrow. Here are five very productive ways to spend this gift of free time.

1. Make a Game Plan

One incredibly productive way to spend some free time is to make a more efficient game plan for the time that is not free. It is very likely that a major reason that you do not seem to have a lot of free time or, at least, time to fit in the things you want to or need to get done, is because you are not efficiently using all your time.

Break your days down into hours and mark down all the times where you have definite obligations. By giving yourself a visual layout of your life, you will very likely see gaps of free time that you did not know you have. In these gaps of new found time, maybe you can go to the gym, clean out and upgrade your guinea pig’s cage, or pick up a new hobby like taking online singing courses! The possibilities are endless!

2. Make the Call

From friends to family members, there are many people in your life whom you should be staying in touch with. You keep saying that you will call, but life gets in the way. Suddenly a week has gone by, and you have not reached out once. The perfect time to call is right now!

While it may seem more social than productive, maintaining your relationships is incredibly important. If you do not call now, you will have to call at a time that is far busier and less convenient for you. By using this time, you can wholeheartedly commit yourself to the call, and your relations will be happy that you called. If the conversation goes well, it may give you the energy and needed motivation to continue with other work.

3. Organize and Re-Decorate

If you have been living in the same house for a while, there is a chance (unless you are an incredibly efficient individual, in which case, I commend you) that your home may be in need of a new organizational system. You may be very aware of this, but up until now, you have never had the time to go about it. You have time now to look at what aspects of your home could be changed to maximize efficiency and go about changing them!

There is also a chance that you do not want to re-organize your living space, but you are ready for a bit of re-decoration. If you have always thought that your bed would look better against that back wall, now is the time to move it around and see if you are right. Then, when you come back from work, you will have a new, exciting space to come back and relax in.

4. Make a Budget Plan

While this may not be the most exciting way to spend your free time, it is certainly one of the most efficient. If you do not have a budget plan, this is a great time to rip the band-aid off and really evaluate your spending. By familiarizing yourself with how much you spend, how much you need to save, and how much money you have for doing things you want to do, you will be able to use other free time more efficiently as well.

If you already have a budget plan, there is never a bad time to pay it another visit. Times change, and expenses change. Maybe you’ve had the same web hosting service without realizing that there are better and more affordable web hosting services out there. If you’ve been considering home remodeling, maybe it’s time to finally make those calls to home remodeling contractors and start writing down their quotes and your budget. There may be more expenses that you need to pay off that you had not accounted for, or you may have more extra spending money than you thought! Looking at and evaluating your finances is never a waste of time.

5. Get a Head Start

While it may seem obvious, using your free time to get a head start on work that you know is coming up in the not-so-distant future is an excellent way to use your free time. By getting even a small jump on paperwork or bill payments, you save massive amounts of time in the long run.

This start does not have to involve a massive production and a finished product. Sometimes the process, for example, of creating and titling a new word document or jotting down a full bullet point list, is enough to get the assignment churning in your mind. This way when you come back to complete the task, you have already been mentally mulling it over for a few days.