The small things

Perhaps more than most, I start each new year with a long list of things I’d like to do and accomplish. There aren’t any great reasons that we’ll be able to accomplish something this year that we couldn’t do last year, but we can prioritise, and hopefully each year has its harvest of achievements and advances. Time is the crucial currency we invest to achieve. It’s not that there’s not enough time but that it seems to be a common trait that we use it so badly.

I was intrigued in 2013 by a podcast with the author of ‘The first 20 hours‘, which talks about just how much expertise you can have after dedicating 20 solid hours to learning a skill. And yet every week we do little with so much more time. I generally come home from work at 6pm (it’s quite structured as I catch a bus that leaves work at 515pm, then catch a metro train that arrives every five minutes, and then walk 5 minutes home). I go to bed at ten or just after. So I have four free hours every evening, and generally only one evening in the week with a fixed activity (church small group on Tuesday). The only activity I need to do in that time is eat. When my wife is around, I don’t even have to cook my meal, wash-up or other household activities (though I sometimes do).

So, in my pampered life, where does my time go? Just twenty hours (even in one week) learning something like playing piano, webdesign, coding or graphic design could really add an extra string to my bow. I don’t need to do things like sport in the evenings as that has its place in the mornings, though I occasionally do a second session.

So I could be doing a considerable amount. I often lose a bit of time continuing with work-related activities, but I think most time gets lost failing to dedicate myself to achieving big things by doing rather small things, chief among them social media and reading the news. If I could just restrict these two things to small discreet parts of the day, there’s a lot God-willing I could do in 2014.

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