Estimated reading time: 2 minutes, 43 seconds.
TODAY’S IDEA: How do you spend your time?
— From 100 Blocks a Day (blog post) by Tim Urban, WaitButWhy.com
One of my favorite blogs is Tim Urban’s WaitButWhy.com, the ideas are brilliant and the stick figure illustrations make me laugh so much! A while back he wrote a blog that made me reconsider how I use my time and I want to share it with you here.
The idea is simple but very insightful: if we are awake for about 16 or 17 hours a day, that means that our days are made up of an average of 1,000 minutes. Urban says, “let’s think about those 1,000 minutes as 100 10-minute blocks. That’s what you wake up with every day. Throughout the day, you spend 10 minutes of your life on each block, until you eventually run out of blocks and it’s time to go to sleep.”
How are you using those 100 blocks on a daily basis? How much of that time is spent on working towards your goals? How much of it is spent in doing not-so-important tasks? How much is devoted to entertainment? Family? Friends? Exercise? Food? And how do one-day’s blocks differ from another? Are there any similarities?
The most important thing to keep in mind here is to “think about everything you might spend your time doing in the context of its worth in blocks.”
Imagine they’re laid out in a grid such as this one below that Urban created (click on the image to print it directly from WaitButWhy.com) and that you are going to label them with a purpose.
“Cooking dinner requires three blocks, while ordering in requires zero—is cooking dinner worth three blocks to you? Is 10 minutes of meditation a day important enough to dedicate a block to it? Reading 20 minutes a night allows you to read 15 additional books a year—is that worth two blocks? If your favorite recreation is playing video games, you’d have to consider the value you place on fun before deciding how many blocks it warrants. Getting a drink with a friend after work takes up about 10 blocks. How often do you want to use 10 blocks for that purpose, and on which friends? Which blocks should be treated as non-negotiable in their labeled purpose and which should be more flexible? Which blocks should be left blank, with no assigned purpose at all?”
Interesting concept as to how to see and use time, don’t you think?
ACTION
TODAY: Think of your day in 10-minute blocks. How are you going to use them? What would be the best use of your 100 blocks?
FUTURE: Go through the exercise of labeling the blocks, especially the daily, non-negotiable ones. What is most important to you? Devote at least one block daily to an activity that moves you closer to your goals. Analyze how you are spending your time and determine whether that is the best use of it. If not, find help, delegate tasks, automate them, or, if you can, eliminate those activities that are not getting you closer to your goals. And since you are reading this blog, a big, wholehearted THANK YOU for devoting half a block to it! 🙂
Know someone who needs to organize his/her blocks better? Please share this post with them via email, Facebook or Twitter, thanks!