How many times have you said I wish my day had more than 24 hours?

I had constantly experimented with new methods to squeeze more hours out of my day, and extend my time to be able to do more and be more efficient at juggling all the things I have to do, together with all those I want to do, in a finite amount of time which seems to be always running out.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had an epiphany: What if told you we’re used to splitting our day in an inefficient segment of time?

I have discovered the power of short.

We can have more than 24 ~splits of time~ per day, it’s just a matter of redefining the length of those splits. Your day doesn’t have to be 24 hours long, when it can be 48 half-hour long, or 96 quarter-hour-long.

This simple yet powerful realization brought me out of the concept where I was constantly trying to squeeze activities in one hour chunks: going to do one hour of exercise then read for one hour then play with the kids for one hour.

If you split your day in smaller segments, you can do exponentially more, sustain that variety of activities more efficiently over time, and more easily define habits because of the consistency you get every day.

Let me explain what I mean by that with an example.

Scenario 1 - the per-hour strategy:
I’m going to exercise for one hour, three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That’s a very usual thing you hear people say. You would get a good three hours of exercise every week!

The first problem with that is, if your schedule gets altered at all, say somebody puts in a meeting on Monday right at the time of your workout session, you lost one third of your total exercise for that week, since it will also be harder to find a new full one-hour spot to match your one hour workout plan.

The other problem is, the next day you will not exercise, which means you lost the consistency you need to establish a good habit, particularly if your cue is a given time of the day.

Scenario 2 - a shorter split:
I’m going to exercise 30 minutes every day. That would add up to three and a half hours total over the course of a week!

Now lets see how the problems of Scenario 1 would apply here. If somebody puts in a meeting in your expected workout time, you only lost one sixth of your total workout for the week, and finding a 30-minute spot is likely easier throughout the rest of your day if you want to recover it.

And the next day, you go at it again - you get consistency every day which makes it much easier to build a habit with simple time based cues.

Consistency over time beats isolated lengthy stretches

Bottom line is, the key to success is long term consistency - short bursts work for some things some times, but in general, it is much more effective to do something consistently over time. Want to meditate, do 15 minute sessions every day. Want to read more, keep a book always by your side and dedicate 15 minutes to read whenever your last meeting ended and before your next meeting begins.

Splitting your activities in shorter segments also helps you find small pockets that would otherwise have gone wasted by social media and similar, arguably wasteful uses of time.

Get out of the hourly segmenting of your day and explore with shorter time spans, you will see that over time you will get better results, and doing all those things you want to get done becomes easier.

Tried it out? Let me know how it went!

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