All It Takes Is 5 Minutes to Make the Next 5 Hours Matter
What would happen if you never wasted another minute of your life?
How would your life look?
Would you cure cancer, win a Nobel Peace Prize, or figure out time travel so you can relive the minutes wasted and improve upon them?
Probably not.
However, you could do many impactful things if you took the time to be intentional.
There is a lot to accomplish over a 24-hour day (minus 8 for sleep, leaving you 16 hours). And realistically, it may not get done, leaving you feeling like you wasted a day.
Knowing that it is impossible to do it all, one action you can do to make being productive easy is to take 5 minutes to be intentional.
It is so easy to get caught up with the busyness of a day, and sooner or later, the day is gone — Poof!
Another day comes, and the routine may get repeated. Which can get frustrating.
Sometimes it is easy to think we need a master plan or may feel we need to throw money at fixing the issue of our lack of productivity. However, the trick can be as simple as being intentional with your time.
How? Try this exercise; Take the next 5 minutes and plan out your next 5 hours if you are off track.
Simple right?
What is good about this activity is that you are not endlessly planning your entire day, week, month, or year. Or even your next ten years.
These 5 minutes can take a lot of pressure off you if you are goal-oriented — it is like a set of marching orders.
I like to prepare. However, I wasn’t the most effective at execution. For example, I would take the time to plan in detail for the next six months or so, and when push came to shove, I didn’t follow through because the planning was too rigid.
Charting a life plan and sticking dogmatically to it is fundamentally limiting; I didn’t add any flexibility to my goals, and just like that, I failed.
I still do keep my plans. However, I approach it more with immediacy. For example, I am working on my writing goals. I know where I want to be in the next year, but anything can happen that can change those plans.
However, if I take the next 5 minutes to think about my goal and plot a course of action I can take in the next 5 hours, it can come to fruition.
In those 5 minutes, I am proactive in outlining three things that have to happen in the next 5 hours, no matter what. (FYI — this article was a product of a 5-minute plan. I decided to write the outline, first draft, edit and publish within 5 hours)
This exercise enables me to be deliberate rather than reactionary, and I am becoming a more intentional person in the process.
These short respites are essential to prepare for the day’s full potential.
And if done consistently toward a goal for a year, who knows what will happen.
Think about how purposeful your actions would be if you took the next 5 minutes to plan your next 5 hours and then executed your plan. It is a challenge worth taking up.
Let me know your thoughts.
Thank you for reading.
*Top Writer in Reading *Toronto Born *Brooklyn Raised *Family Man *Writer *Tradesman *Reading Coach *Student of Life. Check me out *https://linktr.ee/Teronie