How to Get 100% from Your Life, 10 Minutes at a Time
We all have dreams. Modern life is busy so where do we find the time to achieve them? Time itself is part of the problem because it is fiendishly difficult to measure. There are 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year… and all fitted into 12 months of 28, 29, 30 or 31 days. It’s a muddle!
It only gets more complex. Each day is made of crazy, oddly shaped chunks. There is the bit before getting to work, then the working day and then that tired evening that all too often vanishes in a puff of regret. What proportion of your day is represented by each of these timeslots? It’s far from obvious.
Here’s a thing: what if we could visualise our day more easily? What if it could be divided into more easily understandable chunks so that we could really get a grip on it? Being able to see time properly is the first step to conquering it. The good news is that this easily understandable measure already exists. It is a simple little block of 10 minutes.
Everyone’s day is different but most have certain similarities, like approximately how long we sleep. Let’s start by supposing that you wake up in the morning at 0630 and go to sleep at 2310. Looking at those times it’s not immediately obvious how much time you are actually awake during each day. Any quick calculations? Well, I can tell you that it is 16 hours and 40 minutes. There are no revelations there… until we count it in a slightly different way. This is exactly 1000 minutes.
Divide that by one hundred and you get 10 minutes. There are one hundred lots of 10 minutes in your Waking Day.
10 minutes is 1% of your day.
Perhaps your Waking Day is a little longer; perhaps it’s shorter: it doesn’t matter. What matters is an approximate visualisation. All of a sudden there is no longer any mystery to time. At a stroke, your day is decimal. This is incredibly powerful.
Suddenly you can visualise what proportion of each day you spend on valuable things… and on time wasters. The 1000 Minutes Principle helps you to use the time you have properly instead of feeling like time is using you. You can stop bad habits and think differently about the hours you spend working. Furthermore, each Waking Day can define your entire life.
A survey in 2014 found that UK adults spent almost four hours every day watching television. That is a mind-blowing 24% of the Waking Day. If you do that every day of your life, well, it’s a quarter of your entire Waking Life. Is that really a good use of your time? On your deathbed, will you look back on the many hours of television and reflect on how wonderful it was?
So what can you do instead?
The 1000 Minutes Principle can stop the bad stuff… and make good things happen too. We think that we can’t get much done in 10 minutes. That simply isn’t true. Sure, sometimes 10 minutes goes by in a rush… but it also offers a world of opportunities if it’s used regularly and in the right way.
Does 10 minutes feel like less than 1% of your Waking Day? Does an hour feel like more than 6%? Time is confusing like that. The thing is, you can always, ALWAYS find 10 minutes somewhere. This is your 1% Priority Action. You might be exhausted… but it’s only 10 minutes and you really can do it if you want. Over a period, those little segments of 10 minutes will flow together into one massive block of time. This is the secret of Learned Relentlessness, an approach that means returning to your task every single day, for just 10 minutes at a time, until it becomes a positive habit so ingrained that you can’t imagine doing without it.
Through these techniques, the 1000 Minutes Principle asks you to re-examine time, to re-examine your life and your goals, and to strike out on an exciting adventure of discovery, achievement and dream-fulfilment.
See more in my blog…
Tom Evershed 