The Power of 15 minutes

Several years ago, I went through a phase in my life where I was an organizing junkie. I read pretty much every book on organizing that my local library had, tried all sorts of programs, read articles, etc. I studied this a lot. While doing so, I found a book called Sink Reflections by Flylady. (If you want to know more, you can get to her website here.) While ultimately, I didn’t end up sticking with her program, there was one thing that I took away that I’ve been using since then, especially lately: it was the power of 15 minutes.

One of the basic tenets of the Flylady program is something she says over and over again: “You can do anything for 15 minutes.” Basically, the idea is if you declutter and clean for 15 minutes at a time, it isn’t as overwhelming and you don’t get yourself into a mess trying to get organized that you can’t get back out of. You know, like when you were a kid and you decided you’re going to reorganize your bedroom, so you take everything out so you can decide where to put it, but you get sidetracked and by the end of the day your room looks worse than when you started.

This idea stuck with me. I used that idea at various points in my life, but recently, as you know, I’ve rediscovered my timer and have fallen in love with it. And I’m also a firm believer in the power of 15 minutes.

I’ll admit, making the switch from living at home to caring for an apartment hasn’t always been easy. It’s not easy to keep up with the cleaning when I come home from work tired. But setting the timer for 15 minutes and telling myself that when it goes off, I’m done cleaning has done wonders for me. I may be tired, but I get clean my kitchen for 15 minutes. And you know, that’s often all it takes. Sometimes it takes a couple of 15 minutes sets over a couple of days, and sometimes the timer goes off and by then I’m in the mood to clean, so I just keep going.

I’ve also had several projects that I’ve wanted to work on, like going through and cleaning out my iTunes and my reading list on Safari, or working on getting my scrapbooks together (right now I’m settling for “in page protectors where I can see what I have and then someday add more words and pictures and stuff”), or any number of other things. To look at them as a whole is overwhelming.  My playlist of “listen and decide if I want to keep” is 3 days worth of music. But I can work on it for 15 minutes. Sure, it’s doesn’t always seem like a lot gets done, but if I work on it for that 15 minutes every day, it’s gets done a lot sooner than me trying to find a huge chunk of time to work on it. I usually can’t find that huge chunk, but I can make 15 minutes happen.

As I’ve done this, I’ve been shocked at how much I truly can get done in 15 minutes and how much more overall I accomplish doing this. I think too, there’s the aspect of racing the clock that I enjoy and works well for me. I may not have taken much else away from Flylady, but I am a firm believer in the power of 15 minutes. You truly can do anything for 15 minutes, and you can accomplish more than you ever dreamed by doing it.

The Great Internet Experiment Continues!

Things I’m learning from my internet experiment:

• If you get behind on Twitter, it takes forever to catch up when you only have 15 minutes a day. It’s worse than Facebook. The people I follow Tweet a lot, and they’re almost always worth reading. Who knew 140 characters could take up so much time?
• The timer always seems to go off when I’m in the middle of something and don’t want to stop.
• I actually do have the self-control to get off the internet when the timer goes off.
• I use the internet for far more than I ever dreamed I did. How much more would I use it if I actually had a smart phone and had portable internet?
• When I only have 15 minutes, I have a tendency to bookmark articles to read when the experiment is over. I am going to have some serious catching up to do.
• When I only have 15 minutes, I completely drop reading my online comics. I suppose my thought is that most of them take a while to load, eating up my precious time. Also, they are the easiest to catch up on, again once the experiment is over.
• I’m doing a lot more reading than when I didn’t have internet limitations. However, getting sucked into a nine book series that I love and haven’t read in years may also have something to do with that.
• Because my reading has gone up, my productivity has gone down. At least it has this week.  My care meter about my productivity levels has dropped a bit as well, but picked up today. Which is why you’re getting a blog post today.
• This has nothing to do with my internet experiment, but my new roommate brought a TV with her. I had forgotten how distracting a television can be.
• I love my timer. I’m still using it for all sorts of things, and it’s helping to actually do projects I’ve been meaning to do for months because it’s letting me break it down into smaller pieces that I can actually handle.

Lesson Learned From Broom Hockey

First, to report: the great internet experiment is still going well. I definitely find myself wanting to surf beyond my 15 minutes, but I’ve managed to find other things to fill my time. Whether or not these things are any more productive than surfing the net is sometimes debatable, but at least it’s something different!

Saturday night, I played broom hockey with a group of friends. We used part of a local rink and, without skates, ran around on the ice trying to hit a little ball into the goal. It was a lot of fun, with one little hitch. My shoes had terrible traction, so more often than not, (it seemed) my attempts to get to the ball would end with me slipping and falling to my knees or on my rear. A couple of days later, I’m still pretty sore from all the times I fell down.

But you know what? Every time I fell down, I got back up. Sure, I might take a minute to recover (or in one case, I fell to my knees on top of the ball, so I promptly smacked it to a teammate), but every time I got back up. And without fail, I would slip again. It might be five minutes later, it might be longer, but I would slip and fall again. And I get back up.

I was thinking about this in relation to life. How many times does life knock us down, or through our own dumb choices we end up falling on our rears? When that happens, we have two choices: we can either stay down and quit having fun, growing, reaching, stretching, becoming something great, etc. Or we can do the far harder thing and get back up, knowing that chances are we are going to slip and fall again. Once we’re up, we have two choices. We can play it super safe, not really reaching or running to try and get the ball. We may stay upright that way, but we’re not going to win the game playing like that. Or we can reach a little further than we think we can, run for the ball even if we aren’t sure we can make it, and give it all we’ve got. Sometimes we do this, we’ll fall. But then there are the glorious moments when things work out perfectly and we make the shot. We score, reaching what we were working for. We bask in that moment, and then we start playing again, trying for another goal, risking another fall. But in doing this, again and again and again in life, we become the person we’re meant to be.

Anyway, that’s something I was thinking about. And I’ve decided that whether it’s in life or broom hockey, I’d rather keep falling and getting up and giving it my all then staying sitting on the ice or playing it so safe that I don’t get anywhere or do anything. That’s no fun at all, and I’m convinced that’s not the purpose of living. Not even close.

The Great Internet Experiment!

I’ve embarked on an interesting experiment this past week. What with the new year and all, I’ve been taking a look at my life and where it is compared to where I want it to be. As I did so, I came to a conclusion: I’ve been spending too much time on the internet. In fact, I think I was possibly borderline addicted to surfing the net. So, I made a decision.

I decided that I would only get online for fifteen minutes a day for one month.

Now, granted, in this day and age we live in, to do exactly that would be impossible. With my job, I spend all day online because that’s where our files are. So I allowed myself a few exceptions: 1. To use Netflix 2. Unlimited time purely to catch up on my e-mail one day a week 3. When using the internet is inherent to a useful task I need to do. For example, my bank accounts are online, so balancing my budget requires the internet, as does revising my novel, because a good friend of mine did a critique read through of it on Google docs. Beyond that, any other use of the internet was limited to fifteen minutes.

And I’ve stuck to that pretty well. Certainly there have been a few times when I have gone a bit over when I had a specific piece of information I needed to find, but overall it’s only bee fifteen minutes of recreational internet time for nearly a week. (I use a timer to make sure I don’t go over.) And it’s been pretty fantastic, actually.

For one, I’ve been a lot more productive because suddenly I have all that time that used to be eaten up by surfing the internet. I’ve been enjoying a lot more reading, and have been getting to bed at a decent time as well.

Another interesting side effect has been I’m much more evaluating of where I spend my time online. There are several sites I used to visit daily that I haven’t touched at all in the week since I began this experiment. There are others that I still visit, but I’m becoming much more aware of how much time they take up. Checking my newsfeed on Facebook, for example, if I’m just skimming through, can take nearly half my allotted time. If I stop to read the articles that people link to, it takes even longer. I had never really realized how long a “quick check” to Facebook actually took.

In general, I pay much more attention to what I’m in the mood for when I get online. Some days, I just want to surf around Pintrest. Other days I want to read a blog or see what’s up on Twitter. Other days I want to read the comics I follow online. Instead of just doing it all, I’m much more aware of what kind of entertainment I’m looking for.

I suspect that when my month of this is up, I’ll probably allow myself more time, but I think I’m going to keep using the timer. It’s stupid maybe how much that helps me, but it really does. I’ve even started using it in other aspects of my life- when I’m doing chores, playing a computer game, etc. It’s helping me get a firm grasp on how much time I’m spending on things and also freeing me to tackle big projects that normally I would avoid because they take to much time by letting me break it down into a smaller step.  But that’s probably an entire other post for another day. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the freedom I’m finding in my personal internet limitation.

Happy New Year!

Okay, so I’ve been pretty terrible about keeping up with my blog lately, and for that I apologize. Now it’s a new year, and I plan to make a new start with my blog.

Today I’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Specifically, why I often don’t reach mine. I have reached a couple of them a few times, but more often than not, I fail spectacularly. Then I looked at my list of New Year’s resolutions from last year.

I went a bit overboard, I think. I had ten categories, and each category had at least three goals within them. So I had about thirty resolutions! No wonder I didn’t keep most of them. I couldn’t even remember what most of them were, much less keep them.

This year, I tried to simplify it and make goals that I actually could reach and keep. I did end up with ten resolutions, but most of them are things that I was working towards already and are now written down and specific. They are also all goals that I can break down into smaller pieces so I can make monthly and weekly goals as well.

For example, one of my goals is to submit my novel to at least ten places by the end of the year. (Or get it accepted, if by some miracle it doesn’t take that many times. I’m not really expecting that though.) With that overall goal, my goal for January is to finish the revision that I’m on. Next month will likely be to get feedback from my next round of readers. March will probably be another revision, etc. I feel like most of my goals will work well like that- I can break them down into smaller pieces so I can actually do something on them each month and make progress. And I think that will help me actually keep the goals I set. I’m very good at setting goals, but not always so good with the follow through. (As evidenced by the goals I’ve set to write a certain amount in this blog on a weekly basis!) Hopefully this, combined with an increased effort on my part to plan on a daily basis and use a planner, will all combine to help me reach the goals I’ve set for myself this year.