Most of our default settings look to the top of the clock to start anything.
Meetings go for an hour. We block off time for our commitments in hour-long chunks. Even exercise gets its own hour, even if we actually only do 10 minutes of it.
If you think of time in hour-long chunks, you only have so many hours.
Look up at the clock, it’s 12:34pm. Are you waiting until 1:00pm to start the next meeting or task?
Instead of expanding your thinking to fill up each hour, how can you whittle down tasks to take 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 7 minutes?
Some experiments worth trying:
- A daily workout could take as little as 7 minutes.
- Writing a blog post can be done in 10 minutes. Set the timer.
- Meetings can start at 11:05am, or 11:10am, and run for only 10 minutes. (Occasionally I like to schedule phone calls to start at odd intervals to see how people are with punctuality).
- My husband likes to do pushups every time the printer runs. It’s only 60 seconds a few times per day, but it adds up to a lot of pushups.
If you’re not getting it done because you don’t have enough time; why not make less time available for it?
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What’s your routine? What are your habits and ways of being? Leave a note in the comments below, or write a post about your own routine.
This post is part of the Monthly Writing Prompts — check out October’s theme, here or get the monthly writing prompts in your inbox by signing up for the newsletter, here.