You want to blog more. You really do.
Maybe it’s even one of your goals for 2011. But it’s tough when every available chunk of time in your day is spoken for.
Have you ever wondered if a few minutes here and there could add up—if you could just find them?
When my daughter Kelly was 11, the jeans style was big and ugly.
You know, the kind with the legs 10 times too long, so they had to roll up the hems on each leg, like 8 times, to wear them?
I was teaching English to southeast Asian refugee kids by day and spoon feeding tender phrases—”thank you,” “does this bus go downtown?”, “where is the rice noodle aisle?”—to their parents in night school.
I was a single parent and money was tight. In my spare time, I submitted articles to magazines. But I wasn’t finding a lot of time to write.
I would stand in Kelly’s bedroom doorway and say, ” You need to unroll the legs of these jeans before you throw them in the laundry basket.”
To which she would say, “Oh, yeah. I forgot.”
And she would say it the next time. And the next time. And the next time.
I was talking to the wall.
I needed just one good idea. Something to say that would get her attention, grab her by the collar.
One day it came to me. I would write her a letter and slip it under her bedroom door. Maybe she just didn’t know that doing a small thing like unrolling the hems on the legs of her jeans would help so much.
I wrote:
Dear Kelly,
I have been washing your jeans for the past year.
Each time I do, I have to unroll the hems of the legs. This takes me—let’s see—approximately 8 seconds per leg, and 16 seconds for both legs. So that’s 16 seconds every time I wash a pair of your jeans.
You have three pair of jeans and I wash them three times a week, so 16 seconds x 3, that’s 48 seconds a week I spend unrolling the hems of one pair of your jeans —144 seconds for all three.
In one year, that’s more than 124 minutes. You are 11, so I have 7 more years of washing your jeans. That makes close to 14 and a half hours of my time, just unrolling the hems of your jeans.
With an extra 14 hours, I could write 5 1,000-word articles, and I—we—would get an extra $2,500.
I could take 14 more bubble baths.
I could read at least 4 novels. Heck—I could write the first 4 chapters of my own novel.
All this I could do if you just did this one thing for me. How about it?
Love,
Mom
In typical pre-teen fashion, she just rolled her eyes.
“You are so weird,” she said.
It didn’t work. What can I say? She was an 11-year-old.
But today, as I construct my writing goals for 2011, I remember those jeans and all that time wasted. Because tiny pieces of time can add up and, spent in the right way, could bring something marvelous by the end of the year.
At our own house, we’ve been looking at time wasters. We decided to pull the plug on cable. And now, between no more mindless watching of stale sitcoms and cutting back on my nightly reading (from 2 hours to 1), I’ll have at least 2 more hours to work with—every day.
With 2 hours of writing a day, I can finish my book by the end of the year!
Are you discounting your available time—for writing those extra blog posts, for starting your book, for whatever—because you don’t see those minutes?
Where do those little pockets of time exist for you that could be used to propel your blog and your business to great heights in the new year?
What would you do in 2011 with an unexpected gift of time?
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About Judy Dunn
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Danny Brown, DigiPixlet and others. DigiPixlet said: LOVE this article. Thank you. http://ht.ly/3vc0U Find time to do all the things you mean to. [...]
[...] Will You Find Time to Blog in 2011 in Unexpected Places? [...]
[...] Don’t overlook your own family as a source of rich material for blog posts, as in this one I wrote on finding time to write. [...]
[...] Don’t overlook your own family as a source of rich material for blog posts, as in this one I wrote on finding time to write. [...]
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