The Secret Discovery That Gives Busy People More Time Every Day

If you think you have no spare time in your day. You are wrong.

What would you use extra time for?

· Improve your health?

· Invest in learning?

· Deepening your spiritual life?

I made a recent discovery that has given me more time. I’ve used it to improve my health but you could devote this extra time to whatever you wanted.

Here’s where to find it.

Discovering where we discard valuable minutes

When it comes to your day, you focus on chunks of time when deciding what to do. Chunks of time are 30+ minutes. Anything less than 10 minutes gets discarded. This is because we think there is nothing we can do in 10 minutes.

Let me prove this.

Imagine you have to leave the house for work at 8.15 am. You rise at 7 am and get everything done by 8.05 am. What happens then? What do you do with those 10 minutes? Probably not much, except look at your phone.

We think that ten minutes on its own is useless — unless it is attached to another twenty minutes. So we waste it.

But when you think about it, there is lots you can do in 10 minutes.

· Listen to a Ted Talk.

· Read 10 pages of a book.

· Meditate (in fact who can meditate for longer than 10 minutes?)

· Complete 3 sets of 10 of a strength exercise.

· Write in a journal.

Notice all the items on this list are the valuable parts of life. Our health, learning, and well-being. Those areas that get neglected.

I’ve realised that there are bits of time scattered all over the day that get discarded because they aren’t in big chunks.

So here’s the big discovery.

By utilising these little cracks of time in our day we can get all sorts of extra things done. Things that can matter and can improve our lives.

To do this though — you will need to develop two specific skills.

Identify your time crack activities.

The first key is to pre-choose what you will do. When a crack in your day appears you don’t want to waste it deciding. Whenever a time crack appears you need to know what to do.

What ten minutes activity would be most valuable to you?

Here are my top 3 suggestions for you to think about:

*Exercise — pick a couple of simple strength exercises you do. You don’t need a 1-hour session at the gym to make a difference to your health it is much easier than that. You don’t need equipment or lyrca. The biggest health benefit of exercise comes in the first 20 minutes.

*Learning — why not pick an audiobook to listen to. You use the brilliant instapaper app to save anything you find online you want to read later (even better Instapaper removes the ad’s). Another idea is to pick a youtube channel or podcast to listen to.

*Spirituality — why not decide to practice a stillness exercise, pray for someone in need or recall what you are grateful for. So many people want to live deeper, more centred lives but struggle to find the time. if that is you now is your opportunity.

Ok so you’ve got your activity ready, now you need to learn the second skill.

Learn to spot time cracks

It will be hard to spot these 10 minutes opportunities because you are so used to disregarding them. You need to train your mind to learn to spot them.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Think in advance.

If you prime your mind in advance, you are more likely to spot your 10-minute time cracks when they appear.

Based on your typical day when are these time cracks likely to appear?

· Waiting for family members to get ready or arrive home

· Waiting for food to cook

· Gaps between meetings (you finish early or someone is late)

· General procrastination!

Make a mental note of them and imagine doing your activity when they appear.

2. Think about what you missed.

You won’t always be able to predict when your time cracks will appear so you need to keep learning and observing.

Spend a minute at the end of your day reviewing your day and try to identify where you let some time slip through your fingers. Once you start looking you’ll be amazed at much time you disregard each day.

And that’s it. Pick your activity. Spot your time crack. Put the two together.

Imagine the impact of completing hundreds of reps each month, an extra 300 minutes of reading or meditating.

At the risk of sounding a bit crazy, there is one more level to this if you want to go even further.

Taking it to the next level — use the single minutes

This will be a bit much for some people but it is also possible to apply this to the one-minute gaps in our day such as:

· Waiting for the kettle to boil

· Running a bath

Why not use a one-minute activity to fill these gaps?

I’ve started doing 20 squats while waiting for the shower to warm up and before you judge me for this. That means I complete 600 squats every month. Without any real discipline, planning, or giving up any time.

Now, who’s laughing?

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