Ten minutes a day is like a week off work

Little actions add up to big things over time

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is that tiny bits of time do add up.
Rather than hoping for a long stretch of perfect time,

(00:27):
challenge yourself to do a little bit at a time
and just keep going. You may eventually get at the
exact same thing. So I sometimes hear from people that
they are feeling behind on various personal to dos, like say,
cleaning out the basement or attic. The task feels huge,

(00:49):
and everything else in life also feels demanding, So people
say things like I just need to take a week
off work to get organized. But if you think about it,
this is not likely to happen. You are not going
to take a week off work to tackle personal projects
like this. If you do take a week off work,

(01:10):
I guarantee you are going to want to do other
things that don't involve organizing your attic. So instead think
of it like this. Taking a week off work is
like saying you want to devote forty hours more or
less to a project. After all, you will still have

(01:31):
your regular life before and after your work hours even
if you did take the time off. So you're saying
you need forty hours to do whatever it is that
is weighing on you. Is there another way to find
forty hours in your life? Here's a little realization. If

(01:52):
you devote ten minutes a day to something five days
a week, that is fifty minutes a week. If you
do that for forty eight weeks, which is just a
little under a year, you will have logged twenty four
hundred minutes doing this task. Divide by sixty because there
are sixty minutes in an hour, and you get forty hours.

(02:17):
In other words, over the course of eleven months or so,
ten minutes a day is like taking a week off work.
If you find ten minutes a day, five times a
week to tackle a big project, you will basically have
devoted the same time you'd get in a week off
work to it without actually having to take a week

(02:39):
off work. Now, is ten minutes a day as efficient
as devoting bigger chucks of time to a project. Probably not.
You'll likely have some amount of startup time and figuring
out what to do next. But I can tell you
in your forty hours of a week off work, you
would have taken breaks and such too. You can reduce

(03:02):
some of the inefficiency by making lists of what needs
to happen and choosing things that are pretty easy to start.
For some days, you could likely spend the first two
weeks of your ten minutes a day schedule throwing out
trash and see incredible progress without too much thought. But

(03:23):
here's the thing. Eleven months seems like a long time,
but it will pass one way or another. If you
devote ten minutes a day to a big project, you
will in fact see a lot of progress. Will it
be as swift as if you had taken a week
off work? Of course not. But you aren't going to

(03:44):
take a week off work, so it's just silly to
hold that out as the solution when there is another
one available. If you are willing to be patient, ten
minutes a day over the long haul is the same
as a week off work, but the former will actually happen,
so it might be the better choice. In the meantime.

(04:09):
This is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening to before breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com Before Breakfast

(04:39):
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
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