One Hour to Be Awesome

May 09, 2011 13:18

These days, I find myself faced with tasks and goals that seem difficult, if not impossible, to cram into an already busy day. While I never thought life would evolve where I find myself running out of time in a day, here I am struggling to maximizing time in a day just to get a couple of things done.

With most of my substantial goals and tasks (anything involving lots of writing, reading, concentration, etc), it seems like a on going exercise in putting it off for a date when I [think] can plan to dedicate time based on the level of focus required. Environment is also taken into consideration, where I may not be in the right place to evoke and foster the desired amount of focus for the task. Quickly accumulating in a moleskin notebook are outlines to blogs, big ideas, and other to-do items that excite me to work on and/or complete. But notwithstanding the enthusiasm to tackle such, its been increasingly easier to postpone them for the aforementioned reasons.

Despite postponements and advance scheduling of involved tasks, its not uncommon to find myself coming up with an excuse to validate the lack of motivation to actually start. I start looking at the clock and convince myself that five hours won’t be enough, or that five hours is more than enough time, so I can squeeze in something less important and still have time. Next thing you know it’s later in the day, and there I am conceding to another day. Even with one hour left in a day, I find myself spending more time saying what I cant do in that hour than what I could do.

Not long ago, I shared with someone a question I had floating in my head: if you could challenge yourself to be awesome for one hour, what could you accomplish? The idea is that regardless what you have to work on and ignoring how much time you think it would take, if you dedicated just one hour to work towards that task or goal, how much could you do?

In the course of a day, we wake up feeling like we have the whole day ahead of us. For some people, they can hit the ground running to crank out what they can. For the rest of, it's easy to be disillusioned that there is plenty of time left in the day, so we allow ourselves to get to those tasks "later". Speaking for myself, that's where things start to go down hill in the likeliness of getting nowhere closer to completing a task. It isn't until the task's completion becomes absolutely dire that I buckle down and crank it out. When it's done, I'm actually amazed what I managed to completed under a time constrain, which forced me to focus instead of putting it off. I then ask myself, why couldn't I have done that to start with? And the follow up tends spark curiosity in what else I could do if I just treated each of my goals and task as if I only had an hour.

One might argue that this is more an individual's own discipline with procrastination and time management issue. And you know what, they would be absolutely right. I fully admit that as I've gotten older, I've slowly become more relaxed with time management with the false security that I can get it done at the eleventh hour (abeit stressed and under pressure). However, what I find interesting is that while there is some truth in my confidence to tackle a task or complete a goal, it seems part of that confidence spills over in letting me believe I can do it last minute. The last minute comes and there I am trying to find a way to postpone, stressing out to complete it, or just canceling it completely.

I don't necessary think the idea of giving yourself an hour to work on something is the cure all, but I think it's something to think about when working on or toward anything. All of us, myself included, can do anything we challenge ourselves to. Despite realizing it or not, we all have this bank of amazing, great things we want to do with out time, but often we let them go by convincing ourselves we just don't have the time for it.

Although, if you counted all the minutes in a week you've spent day-dreaming about what you wish you could do, added that to the minutes you've spent convincing yourself why you'll never get around to it, I'd argue that you'd come up with a number greater than or equal to one hour. So with that in mind, the question I have for you is if you turned that hour around to tell yourself you could be super human and force to be dealt with, what could you do?

Maybe this is along the lines of a cliche motivation verses proclaiming you could do anything if you put your mind to it, or don't put off what you can do today for another day. But even as much as we're familiar with those and have some amount of dismissed confidence hidden within us, I thinking it speak as a reminder that even when challenged with the bare minimum of a messily hour, we all have the ability to be awesome. And one has to imagine the possibly when you commit the sin of letting momentum take you over an hour, or adding up all the awesome one hours to accomplish something huge. I think its only fair to allow ourselves to be awesome, one hour at a time.




Postscript: This write up took just a little under an hour and half using the time constraint of a flight between San Francisco and Phoenix to write this on an iPad.
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