Lead a vivid life that does good

Tag: Time

Do you have a minute?

Havea minute?I hate running on a treadmill!

Nothing does my head in quite as much as watching minute after minute tick by, while I stay in one place and move exactly nowhere.

It’s funny how one minute can feel like a blink of an eye, but when things are moving slowly or you are watching a countdown each second feels slow and a minute takes forever.

1 minute in the scheme of our lives is not much time. Even in the fullness of a day, one minute only equates to 0.07% of your day. There are 1440 of them each day.

1 minute is nothing. Unless you make it something. A minute every day … can radically transform your life.

The thing about minutes is they build-up. If you were to do a new habit for just a minute a day, you would spend 6 hours on that habit over a year! All from just one minute.

Maybe its writing in a journal. Or meditation. Or prayer. Or exercise (yes 1 minute counts). Or Reading. Or playing with your kids. Or … ?

Do you have a minute?

Just one minute.

Everyday.

Maybe it could change your life!

The other thing about minutes as they seem to extend. Sometimes spending a minute on something daily, is just enough to get you started, and very soon you are spending 5 or 10 minutes a day.

Start small with just 1 minute.

Start today.

Repeat!

We no longer have an excuse not to learn

Carpe Diem - Seize the DayOver the Christmas holidays I spent a little time doing a course at codecademy.com. It only took a few hours and I learnt a lot, engaged a different part of my brain and can now lead our IT team slightly better.

Codecademy is one of literally thousands of free online courses now available on just about any subject, many of them from world leading schools and universities.

10 years ago, this wasn’t possible. Just 10 years!

20 years ago having access to some of the world’s best, for FREE, was unthinkable.

Now, more than ever before, it is possible to learn and gain experience in your own home.

For free.

The only cost … is your time.

Your discipline.

There are no longer any excuses.

No one to blame other than yourself.

So go, seize the day.

 

 

I don’t get time to …

I don’t get time to … think

I don’t get time to … exerciseclock

I don’t get time to … read

I don’t get time to … do good

I don’t get time to … play with the kids

I don’t get time to … relax

I don’t get time to … [fill in the blank]

You are right of course.

You only get time to do the things you choose to do. You can’t make time, but we can lose it doing the wrong things.

Like me you probably need to stop doing some things, to make time for the things that are really important.

Buying Time

I apply the brakes and decelerate for the booth ahead. An oldish graying lady slowly opens the booth window and greets me very pleasantly for 6am. Handing over a dollar coin is eventually followed by the barrier arm rising and my accelerating off down Route K towards Tauranga City. I am quite sure I it is the only toll road in the country, and probably one of the quietest roads as well. There are two many easy alternatives that only add a few km's and minutes to the trip to make it a success.

So why do I pay a dollar? Too save on fuel and time of course.

Later that day I was chatting to Greig about how stupid it is you can't get from 15th Ave back onto the toll road. It is stupid, for the record, because of lost revenue opportunities for them (there would be at least an extra car each day & I would get to save more time). Anyway I admitted to Greig that saving fuel can't be the real reason I take that road. I often drive around aimlessly in my car wasting more fuel than that. Furthermore saving time cant be the real reason because I would waste more time watching a couple of sets of TV ads than I would going the long way.

I was chatting to a friend the other day and she said that she doesn't read some stuff because she doesn't have time. I thought I can understand that. Later however, I thought it is not that we do or don't have the time, it is that we choose not to make the time.

  • I choose to save a small amount of time and lose a dollar. Knowing well I will waste the same amount of time writing this blog.
  • She chooses to spend the time on something else. Which is cool.
  • I encourage my team to take Lead Time to think and plan and read. Most of them choose not to because they are too busy and have no time.

We all have the same amount of time in a day, it is actually that we all choose to use it differently. We can choose to use it on friends or family or love or work or hobbies or watching TV ads or taking toll roads or reading stuff or not.

The only problem is that you never, ever get to live that time again.