Guy Reams (00:00.59)
Today is day 230, 15 minutes adds up.
Since today is Memorial Day, I decided to start organizing a box of family heirlooms. What started as a good intent to archive some content from family members has become several boxes of keepsake clutter. In these boxes are some treasured items from many relatives, including several who were in World War II and World War I. It seems appropriate that I would force myself today to organize these items when I have the time.
and I should be remembering my relatives. It's a slow day and digging through this archive has certainly caused me to remember the heroes of our family. However, as I started the archaeological dig this morning, I soon realized that these boxes had become more than a collection of heirlooms. It has become a collection of every little thing that I did not want to clean up over the last few years. This has led me to the conclusion that 15 minutes really adds up.
This is how it happens. I have a project that I'm working on and I get to some conclusion and then it becomes time to clean up. The cleanup process would take 15 minutes on average. However, rather than spending that 15 minutes properly cleaning up, I decide to borrow that 15 minutes against my future and throw the items that I should have cleaned up into my scrapbook pile.
Now, two years later, I've accumulated approximately 200 hours of work to clean up this mess. Somewhere at the bottom of these boxes are photographs of my wife's father that I wanted to memorialize in some way. My intent was to spend an hour or two creating this nice digital collage to remember my wife's father. But now, instead of doing that cool project, I'm spending the entire day paying off my shortcut debt. The thing is that...
Guy Reams (02:00.462)
Shortcuts of procrastinating the cleaning have led to more than one day of organization effort. I now feel overwhelmed because I need at least 17 days of dedicated effort to resolve this mess. There's no way that I'm going to dig myself out of this hole because I can barely afford one day, much less 17. So the only real way of this getting out of this predicament is the same way I got here. 15 minutes or so a day until I finally get through the pile.
15 minutes per day is roughly 91 hours per year. Now I could double it up. I could try to do 30 minutes a day for a full year. And then I would have erased all the debt that I've accumulated by taking way too many shortcuts. Funny, I look around the house and I find a drawer here and there that has the same issue, just on a much smaller scale. Should I put the screwdriver away? Nah, I'll just throw it in the drawer.
Should I find a place to put these leftover birthday candles or the small little rubber stoppers I forgot to put on the bottom of some furniture I bought? Nah, I'll just throw them in the drawer. Borrowing against the future. One day I'll have to clean up this drawer and it'll take several hours because I've borrowed one to two minutes every day for years. However, this 15 minute add up concept works in reverse as well. You could take the same principle and apply it in a very positive way.
Do you want to learn a new foreign language? 15 minutes a day, every day for a year, and you'll have 91 hours of practice. Need to learn a new concept or gain a new skill? You can make a serious dent in any ambition by doing it every day consistently for an extended period of time. 15 minutes could add up to a great benefit to you as well. There's this man in my neighborhood who lives just down the street who has probably the nicest lawn in all of California, and I'm not exaggerating. It's not because he has really expensive things in his lawn.
is because everything is meticulously groomed. I believe he's a veteran of probably Vietnam or one of the foreign wars because he always has an American flag and a military banner hanging up in his front lawn. But this lawn is absolutely meticulous. Everything is cut to a specified length. Every creeper has a line of string to follow along. Every blade of grass is measured carefully.
Guy Reams (04:24.494)
I mean, it is, it is a beautiful thing to behold. I kind of know this guy's routine now. I see him every morning at the same time, roughly 10 AM to 10 15 every day for 15 minutes. He's out there in his garden. Now he has a gardener that does the big stuff because I think he's too old to do it, but everything else he's in there with his little. Knee pad thing that he puts on the ground so he can bend down and he sits there with very careful precision cuts and prunes every rosebush.
every plant, every blade of grass. So as you go through your day, you have a consideration to ponder. That spare 15 minutes, it can work for you or against you. You can choose to use that 15 minutes to clean up and organize your previous project, use it to focus on something really important to you, or you can use it to delay and procrastinate the inevitable. No matter what you choose, this time will accumulate.
It adds up either for you or against you. Having said this, I'm heading back to the attic now for me to continue sorting through the junk boxes. I mean, the family history archive. Thank you.