Your life is busy, right?
- Your job has overlapping demands; before you finish one project, you’re assigned another.
- You have little people in your house with little people expectations.
- You have big people in your house with big people expectations.
- You have expectations of yourself, and sometimes beat yourself up when you get behind (or can’t be perfect).
- You have bills to pay, floors to vacuum, things that break and need repair, and a bottomless hamper with perpetual laundry.
I’ve always struggled with that idea – feeling like I’m at the mercy of all the demands of others, and not doing the stuff that I really want to do. I want to read at lunchtime, but rush through it to get a checkmark that I read – not to absorb and enjoy. I’d love to take a digital course online and learn new skills, but even the short ones could take several hours.
It feels like the important stuff always gets crowded out by the urgent stuff.
As author Tim Hansel said, “When I relax, I feel guilty.”
Sound familiar?
For years, I’ve said, “I don’t have time” for a lot of the good or important things. But years ago, I found a solution to reverse that mindset.
And it started when I bought an electric toothbrush.
It was probably 20 years ago, and it was kind of a fancy one at the time. The idea was that you would turn it one and brush each quadrant of your mouth – four of them, obviously, front and back) for 30 seconds each. The toothbrush would beep every 30 seconds so you could move to the next section.
You’d spend two minutes brushing your teeth in the morning, then repeat it at night.
Total time: 4 minutes per day.
I got used to it pretty quickly. It was a little longer than I brushed before, but it was kind of fun – and I knew I was getting good results.
It wasn’t a big commitment; just something I had gotten into the habit of doing, but it had a little more structure.
I wondered how much that added up to in a year’s time. So, I ran the numbers.
- 4 minutes per day, 365 days per year = 1,460 minutes
- 1,460 minutes divided by 60 minutes = 24.3 hours
Every year, I spend a little over 24 hours brushing my teeth.
That’s a full day (and night).
I thought, “I should just set aside one full day – 24 hours – and brush my teeth all day – from midnight one day to midnight the next. I could get all my brushing done and wouldn’t have to brush for the rest of the year!”
OK, that might defeat the purpose. But I learned something significant from that process:
Tiny bits of time add up to huge results.
I thought of another place it might apply:
We cut our cable a few months back and moved to a streaming service that provides the basics. For an extra $5 per month, we got it without commercials. That means that we can watch an entire 60-minute program in 43 minutes. Again, I did the math:
- Before we signed up, we were watching 17 minutes of commercials every hour.
- If we only watched one program per day, that adds up to 119 minutes per week.
- That’s 103 hours per year.
- That’s the same as fifteen eight-hour workdays.
Can you imagine taking three weeks off work to do nothing but watch commercials?
What if you could take those 17 minutes of commercials and do something constructive with them?
- If you read a book for 17 minutes a day, think how many books you could read in a year.
- If you signed up for a digital course to build your skills, you could finish it easily in a few weeks.
- If you wrote 100 words a day (one medium-length paragraph), you’d complete a 35000-word book manuscript in less than a year.
- You could send a quick note of encouragement to someone in 17 minutes each day, and you would have “made their day” for 365 people in a year.
- You could process or discard three pieces of paper in those piles on your desk and end the year with a clean office.
When you really want to do something but feel like “I don’t have time,” it’s an inaccurate mindset.
We feel like we can’t accomplish anything big because we don’t have any big chunks of time.
We don’t need big chunks of time.
We need tiny chunks of time, use them for a purpose and repeat them.
Look at the things you do every day. Is there anything you could streamline or omit to recover 4 (or 17) minutes?
If so, what’s something you could do with those minutes that could add up to something big over time?
Skeptical? Would you be willing to try it for a week and see what happens?
I tried it. I have really healthy teeth, and I’m not spending money on things that advertisers are tempting me with.
Try it for a week and let me know how it goes. If you’ll try it and let me know the results (mike@mikebechtle.com), I’ll drop the results in a future note to send out to everyone. It’s a great chance to experiment and help others do the same.
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Want some help with all that? I’ve got two things to get you started:
1. Today, my newest book launches. It’s called One-Minute Tips for Confident Communication. It’s based on the content from one of my earlier books, How to Communicate with Confidence.
It’s short – 100 tips, each about one page long. It’s inexpensive, and it’s small. If you read one tip each day, you’d improve your communication skills in just over three months.
And it’s a great stocking stuffer for your teens and family members.
I’ll give you more details in a few days. But it’s on Amazon and all the other outlets now, so I wanted to put it on your radar. It’s a quick, fun read – and it’s more beneficial than commercials for laundry detergent and ketchup.
2. I mentioned a digital course to build your skills in some areas – which can improve your life, and even make you more valuable in your work environment. I’ll help with that one soon – a simple, new digital course that we’re building to help you with building your confidence. It’s just a few weeks away, and I’ll give you the details as soon as I can. I’ve already recorded the videos, so now the team is building and polishing the course itself.
I’m excited about this, because people have asked in the past if I was every going to have something available. The quick answer is, “Yes.” And more in the future. Stay tuned.
You could even brush your teeth while you’re watching . . .