Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at Fifteen Minutes A Day, another of the seemingly ever expanding list of Blogs dedicated to personal development/self improvement, time management/personal productivity, and basically squeezing more juice out of life.
Before starting up this Blog I asked myself the question, do we really need another Blog related to personal development? After all there are literally hundreds out there and there isn’t enough time in the day to read them all and still do anything in our lives. But I decided to start it anyway, first and foremost just for fun, secondly for the writing experience, thirdly for contribution – the sharing of ideas that I come across and finally, because this is a lifestyle experiment and this blog I hope will hold me to the commitment of following through with it, sharing the results and hopefully inspiring others to grasp those little islands of just fifteen minutes in a day that can literally over the course of a year change the direction of a life.
The premise of this Blog is that in the fast pace modern world, where there are so many things that compete for our attention, it is all too easy to go through a day not doing things that you would tell someone else if asked, are the things most important to you. Yet, so many of these things can be done in just fifteen minutes (or at least in that time something can be done towards the progress of that goal or task). For example, by reading the Bible for just fifteen minutes per day one could read the entire Book in one year.
Furthermore, fifteen minutes represents just over 1% (1.04% to be precise) of the time in a day.
Are you really living life consistent with what you say is most important to you if you say that you value your:
- Spiritual life, but can’t find fifteen minutes during a day to read scripture or pray?
- Health, but can’t find fifteen minutes during a day to exercise, or even just walk?
- Family, but can’t find fifteen minutes during a day to just give your full 100% attention to those you love most
- Personal Growth, but can’t find fifteen minutes to read a book or listen to an audio programe or write your list of most important goals.
This revelation occurred to me in October of 2007. I had fallen behind on some of my goals for the year, my life was out of balance (not for the first time) and I wondered if I could ever really grow and achieve the goals I had set for my personal and professional life, yet keep some sense of balance in my life at the same time. Most importantly, I looked at how I was spending my time and compared it to my list of values and realized that things were drastically out of synch. In my spiritual life I wasn’t spending time either reading the Bible or in prayer. In the area of my health, I seemed to have no time to exercise, and so on. Yet, I realized one evening while writing in my journal that fifteen minutes a day represented just 1% of the day that I had at my disposal. Just 1%. Was my spiritual life not important enough to me that I couldn’t devote 1% of my day to it? Was my health not important enough that I could devote at least 1% of my day to that?
This shift in my thinking put me on a different track… and I started to think of how I could make sure I spent at least fifteen minutes a day doing things that are truly most important to me or have a long term pay off. I will be sharing more of my own experiences over the next few days and weeks, along with further experimentation in this idea.
Interestingly, just a few weeks after I had this realization of my own, Mike Williams (author of the Zone by Zone blog) published his own article called “What can you do in 15 minutes a day?”
It’s a great article and gives some ideas just to fan the flames on what can be done in just fifteen minutes per day.
