I can’t overstate how much this 1 hour activity can improve your life by adding hours to your day.
Set aside an hour where you can really keep track of your time. Get a timer and set it to 60 minutes. A simple egg timer or stopwatch will work. Do your activity within that hour. When the timer goes off, write down how you spent the last 60 minutes.
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Write down every detail: What did you do for the first 15 minutes, the next 15 minutes, and so on.
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Write down what intention you set for yourself at the beginning of those 60 minutes.
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What goals did you plan to complete in those 60 minutes?
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What you were thinking about during that hour?
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Record your feelings while those 60 minutes passed.
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What did you accomplish within that hour?
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Did you meet your goals?
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If you fell short of your goals, what happened? Did you take a phone call? Did you get distracted by something or interrupted by someone? How much longer do you estimate it will take you to accomplish your goal?
If you accomplished exactly what you set out to do, congratulations! Did it take you the entire hour to do what you intended? Or did you finish early and move on to something else?
If you really keep track of your time during one hour of any given activity, you will find you can save yourself time. How? If you really focus and lay out the hour as instructed above, you will finish as you intended.
As you begin to use this process, you’ll start to accomplish your goals early. You will find you can gain as much as 5, 10 or even 15 minutes in an hour. If you meet your goal early, set the timer and go on to the next project to complete within 60 minutes. Do it again. If you do this for 8 hours straight, how much time did you gain?