10 minutes
“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.”
A lot can be accomplished in 10 minutes.
I have been thinking about this since I read Someday is Today, by Matthew Dicks. Dicks is a bit of a productivity guru. While working full time as a teacher, he has written eight books, hosted a podcast, won dozens of storytelling competitions, written a daily blog, and run a wedding DJ business, among other pursuits.
His book has me thinking more about how much time in my day goes wasted.
“Time is the most valuable commodity on the planet, and you have just as much of it as the wealthiest people alive. Value it accordingly. Never waste it away.”
The comparison of our financial frugality versus how we use our time is interesting. While I expend considerable effort cutting costs, saving money, and looking for good deals on the products I buy (but don’t need), I pay almost no mind to how I am spending my loose time.
“The problem is that so many of us discount the value of minutes and overestimate the value of an hour or a day or a weekend. We dither away our minutes as if they were useless, assuming that creativity can only happen in increments of an hour or a day or more. What a bunch of hooey.”
Every day I find myself with pockets of 12 minutes, or 17 minutes, or 7 minutes before I need to leave to meet someone or to run an errand. 15 minutes until she gets here, 10 minutes before Trader Joe’s opens.
Those minutes typically get wasted away, fidgeting around or distracting myself with a YouTube video. But throughout the course of a day, a week, or a month, those minutes add up.
I estimate I have an hour each day unfilled, waiting for the next thing on my to-do list. This means that over a full month, there are thirty hours of productive time waiting to be leveraged. Thirty hours a month dedicated to anything would yield tremendous progress and is worth trying to recapture.
In the book, Dicks asks the reader to make a list of all the things you can accomplish in ten minutes and post this as a reminder around your home, on your to-do list, etc. This way you can reference it any time you find yourself in these dead zones between what you have done and what you need to do next.
My initial list reads:
Clean any room in my apartment
Play with Nappy
Train Nappy
Walk around the block
Write a paragraph for the blog
Review my goal progress
Meditate
Do my fear/change of state exercise
Yoga
Shower
Start laundry
Fold laundry
Read 10 pages
Journal
Play
Make some tea
Rest
There are more ways to use this time, and I’ll add to this list as I think of them.
“The trick is to utilize your time effectively. To value every minute of the day equally, regardless of how many other minutes are attached to it. Once you have chosen to value every minute, you can begin to create systems by which those precious minutes can be used.”
As I have begun trying to leverage these stray pockets of time, I have quickly noticed the impact throughout the day.
My traditional method of accountability has been to keep a whiteboard on my refrigerator that has a list of the activities I want to complete each day on the left side, such as 30 minutes of meditation, an hour of reading, 30 minutes of blog work, etc. Across the top of the board, I have the days of the week listed.
As I move through my day, I make a blue mark on the ones I’ve completed and a red mark on the ones I didn’t. The idea is that I see a visual representation of where my efforts have fallen short over the week, and I can reprioritize as needed to make progress in all areas.
After playing around with this new approach from Dicks, I am noticing that my blue marks are quickly getting accomplished much earlier in the day. In fact, I am finding time at the end of the day to spend more time on these activities.
Like any habit, it will take a few weeks to ingrain this way of thinking and behaving into my day. But if time is our most valuable commodity, saving more of it for productive efforts is a worthwhile pursuit.
Give it a try and make your own list. What can you accomplish in 10 minutes?
“When we are facing the last seconds of our lives, minutes become precious. The key is to understand their preciousness today when there is still time to make those minutes matter.”