Living Life Fifteen Minutes at a Time

How often do you say I wish I had more time. There aren’t enough hours in a day. How will I get everything done? I wrote about this in Getting It Done last year. If you have a lot to do, time management is important. This week I read an article at Creating a Better Life on How To Get Things Done, where Lyman talks about the Fifteen Minute Rule. The fifteen minute rule says that you only have to work at something fifteen minutes. After that, you can stop, go on to something else.

Fifteen minutes. Do you know how many fifteen minute chunks of time there are in a day? If you sleep eight hours a day, there are sixty-four of them. Sixty-four! Sixty-four chunks of time that you can use to do what you want to do in your life. The possibility to engage in sixty-four different activities.

In fifteen minutes you can vacuum the living room, schedule your day, write the first draft of a blog post. In fifteen minutes you can clean the bathroom, watch a quarter of an episode of Buffy, clean up your inbox. In fifteen minutes you can prepare the food for dinner, eat breakfast, do the dishes. In fifteen minutes you can meditate, visualize a goal in 3-D technicolor with all the feelings its achievement generates.

Fifteen minutes is a long time. Try it for a week. Block out fifteen minutes slots to do what you want to do, and to do what you need to do. Some of these blocks will need more than one fifteen minute slot. After all a candlelight dinner with your significant other should take a lot longer. But most things can be done in fifteen minute chunks. Try it. Take control of your life.

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