I hate waiting around and doing nothing. So when I have to be somewhere at 8:00, I'm there at 8:00. Yeah, I'm one of those types of people. I do something when I have to do something, instead of taking a little bit of time to prepare.
I'm always rushing to do something or get somewhere. There's the problem.
I don't remember where I read it or how I started using the 15 minutes rule. It's basically giving yourself 15 minutes to start your day, end your day, time to prepare or amount of time spent tackling a large task.
In the morning, I use to get my clothes ready, iron, prep and then get ready to go to work. While at work, I would work up until the very end of the day. When I come in the next morning, I'm lounging around for about an hour before I even start working trying to figure out how to plan my day.
When I started the 15 minutes rule, I would take 15 minutes every night to get my clothes ready for tomorrow. I'll tell you that it's worked very well for me on leaving to work on time and getting to work on time. I'm not scrambling to try to get ready in the morning, or find that the shirt I wanted to wear has a stain that didn't come out.
At the end of my work day, I stop 15 minutes before the day is over. In the 15 minutes, I get my coffee cup cleaned, I organize my desk with the work I'm going to do when I come in tomorrow and begin ending my day. The benefits of all this has allowed me to get more work done in the same amount of time, and move from one pile of work to the next pile of work and get them knocked out quickly and in an orderly fashion throughout the day.
If I have to go meet up with friends at a bar at 9:00 and I know it takes 20 minutes to get there, I'll leave 15 minutes earlier. Now, I'm just cruising to the bar instead of rushing over there, find parking, and hopefully don't keep everyone waiting. What's the big deal about it? Well, I've been able to come in relaxed and the extra few minutes allows me to speak individually to some of my friends before the rest of the guys get there. It also gives me time to meet new people and chat it up. If I don't really like them or don't think they are cool, when the rest of the friends show up later, it gives me an excuse to break away. Or if they end up being a really cool person, I'll invite them to hang out with us.
I've used 15 minutes also to clean up and organize around the house. It's easier to spend 15 minutes to clean everyday then it is to spend a whole day once a month to take on a big organization task. If I can't clean and organize the books in 15 minutes, then I stop. I'm not tired and I can go do something else, like go hang out with the boys. Tomorrow, I'll come back and spend another 15 minutes organizing the books. Eventually I'll finish organizing all the books. The key thing to take away from this was that it's such a small amount of time and energy spent that it never really felt like a chore to do. The end result was there.
Try doing this 15 minutes for some of your daily tasks. You might like it and start applying it to other aspects of your life.
ItsForDad.blogspot.com
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