Time Management

The 1-Minute Challenge

 

There are never enough hours in the day to accomplish what you want - that's a given. So, what would be another way to approach it?

 

Mine is to get more time out of my minutes! Obviously I'm showing you an extreme example here - 1 minute - but the concept holds good whether it's 5 minutes, 30 minutes or 60 minutes.

 

Here's the challenge:

Find yourself an alarm-timer (your watch, the microwave, a proper seconds-and-minutes timer) and set it to one minute.

 

Decide on what you want to spend one minute tackling: the state of your desk, that disgrace you call a kitchen (no, wait, that's me), that pile of papers, your bedroom. The point is to find something you dislike doing and which clearly requires far more than one minute to sort out.

 

Set in your mind quite clearly that you are going for maximum effect - so that means not picking some fiddly little thing that really wouldn't show much change if you worked on it for a year.

 

Start the timer and go to it, as fast as you can, focusing on what will make the biggest difference. If it's your bedroom, it might just be chucking everything that doesn't belong in it outside the door (no wandering into other rooms to place it). If it's your paperwork it might simply be sorting it into 'envelopes opened' and 'envelopes not yet opened', or 'things to act on' and 'information only'.

 

Be stunned at how much you achieved in one minute! I have been known to clear up my messy kitchen in 1 minute, and it rarely takes more than 5, including the floor!

 

Your next step - the 5-minute challenge!

So, now you have seen how much you can achieve when you focus and go for the greatest gains. The next step is to try the 5-minute challenge: choose a similar dull or hated task, decide what would make the biggest difference, achievable in a short period of time, and go for it, just as you did for the 1-minute challenge.

 

If you apply the same sort of thinking as you did for the 1-minute challenge (perhaps mentally sorting it into 5 x 1-minute challenges), you will, I promise, be amazed at how much you can achieve in a short time.

 

And the point of this was...

The point of this exercise was to show you that there is a lot more time in your hours than you realised, and that we are all guilty of stretching boring tasks out into the time available. If a task is dull, turn it into a game, a time-challenge! And whenever you switch from one major task to another, slot in a 5-minutes challenge: you'll find it pays for itself 50-fold!

 

The other point I hope to have made is that when you tackle a task (no matter what size), it makes a big difference when you decide at the start what will make the biggest impact in the shortest time. What most of us will do is start in one corner or other of the task and just keep on going, making it up as we going along. This will just eat away your day, your free time. Exactly how long do you want to devote to doing things you dislike?!

 

Why obsess about time management?

Well, everyone has their different reasons, but mine is so that I can have more time to relax and do absolutely nothing except dream up ideas.... Yours may be that you need to create more space for your major tasks, or that you know the only way you'll get the dull things done is to do it in short bursts (and you can't get much shorter than a high-powered minute!).

 

My recommendation to everyone is to buy yourself a timer and always work in blocks of 5-30 minutes, depending on the task (always half what you think it would take, or less). It allows you to focus far more effectively: partly because you know you only need to concentrate on this for that amount of time; but mainly because you are forced to adopt a different, more ruthless approach.

 

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Is your time management in a bigger crisis than this?

 

Perhaps it's your whole life that needs looking at? Our Change Your Life workshop can let you see very quickly where the problems really lie, so that you can waste no time in tackling them and getting your life back.

 

Change your life today! There's no advantage in waiting another minute!