How to improve your day, 10 minutes at a time

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You started today with 100 10-minute blocks of time. Are you using them effectively?
The notion comes from blogger Tim Urban, who points out that after sleep most people have 16 to 17 hours at their disposal, or roughly 1,000 minutes. You spend 10 minutes of your life on each of the 100 blocks – that one-hour meeting is six blocks, for example – until you eventually run out of blocks and it’s time to go to sleep.
He suggests imagining those blocks laid out on a page in a 10×10 grid. That’s your day before you, ready to be filled in. How would you label each block with its purpose?
“How many of them are put toward making your future better and how many of them are just there to be enjoyed? How many of them are spent with other people and how many are for time by yourself? How many are used to create something and how many are used to consume something? How many of the blocks are focused on your body, how many on your mind and how many on neither one in particular? Which are your favourite blocks of the day and which are your least favourite?” he writes.
Popular author Elin Hilderbrand reflected this thinking when she complained recently that her life was increasingly scheduled in five-minute blocks. The frantic pace wasn’t the way she wanted to live so she is proclaiming that she is retiring, which is not true but a lighthearted way of getting across she is taking on other writing that interests her and letting those fan favourite beach reads about Nantucket recede.
Mr. Urban suggests re-evaluating the return you get from each 10-minute investment. “If your favourite recreation is playing video games, you’d have to consider the value you place on fun before deciding how many blocks it warrants. Getting a drink with a friend after work takes up about 10 blocks. How often do you want to use 10 blocks for that purpose, and on which friends?” he says.
Also important is which blocks should be treated as non-negotiable in their labelled purpose and which should be more flexible. And perhaps most important of all is which blocks should be left blank, with no assigned purpose at all.
Venture capitalist Sahil Bloom recommends combining a series of blocks into focused sessions to handle a world continually conspiring to switch our attention from what we are working on currently – or most need to work on. “There is a cognitive switching cost to shifting your attention from one task to another. When your attention is shifted, there is a ‘residue’ that remains with the prior task and impairs your cognitive performance on the new task,” he writes on his blog.
You need to build your focus muscle progressively. He recommends starting with one 30-minute session – three of those blocks (and smartphone out of sight). Work your way up to one hour, two to three times per day by the end of the first month. “From there, extend the periods to two hours (my personal maximum) or four hours (an ambitious target) as your focus muscle strengthens,” he writes.
Some of your 100 blocks for the day will be filled with boring tasks. Shimul Melwani, a professor of organizational behaviour at the University of North Carolina, who co-authored a recent research study on boredom, warns that a boring task can have a lingering effect, diminishing your attention and productivity for a future performance task. She told CharterWorks the researchers found it important to schedule something with high purpose after the boring task – where you feel the work is deeply impactful for yourself or others. “These tasks were really reorienting, they were replenishing. As a result, it broke that path between the suppression of boredom and the desire to mind wander,” she says.
One hundred blocks – ten minutes each. Use them wisely.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.