Your dreams one hour at a time
Do you have a special goal? Going on a dream vacation, writing a book, becoming a YouTuber?
How many hours do you have a day to make your dreams come true? For most people I would say it’s about 1 hour a day, which is seven hours a week, or 15 whole days a year.
Now, one hour does not sound like much so let me break down how I came to that number.
Let’s take a typical day for me.
Sleep 8 hours
Cooking/Eating 2 hours
Work 8 hours
Family/ Friends time 2 hours
Admin 1 hour
Travel 1 hours
That is 2 hours left out of 24 hours
That leaves you two hours a day to make it happen. Let’s round down to be realistic and absorb all the tiny, random elements of life I haven’t been able to account for in my breakdown.
When people set a monthly budget for spending, too often they start with how much they earn rather than how much is left after all their fixed costs are accounted for. It turns out that for most regular people, that bit that’s left is not much.
In time budgeting, what’s left over is one hour a day if nothing else goes wrong, and you don’t have to work any extra. It doesn’t seem like much. But constraints are essential for creativity. And you can let go of the guilt of thinking you haven’t spent enough time on your dream project. You only ever really had one hour each day, so you should feel great at the end of the day if you get in a solid hour of work toward your dream.
So how do you use that one hour a day?
Try this exercise and see if it works for you.
Divide your one hour into four fifteen-minute blocks. Now find 4 small objects, 4 dice, 4 marbles, 4 playing cards. Each one of these represents a fifteen-minute block. Place those four objects on the left side of your work desk. Now, during the course of your day, note when you do an activity that is one of your one-hour future goal activities, such as making a drawing, writing to a friend, or planning your weekend break.
Every time you do one of these activities, move one of the small objects on your desk from the left side to the right side of the desk. At the end of the day, see how many objects now live on the right side of your desk. Two, three, four… however many, this is a way of showing that you are using your precious one hour a day in the way that you want rather than just on your fixed tasks for the day. Even if you only move one item from the left of your desk to the right of your desk, it shows progress.
There is the way you think the world is, and then there is the way the world really is. This is the ongoing battle for all of us: to live in the real world, the world where we get to choose what we want to do, even if it’s only for one hour a day.
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