One hour per day to change your life, starting now

None of us have the perfect life.

Even if we feel perfectly content and comfortable with our current lives, there’s always one thing we think could be a little better.

A little more money.

A little more free time.

A new life experience.

A new challenge.

A new hobby.

A new skill.

What’s one thing you wish you could do or learn right now?

Have you ever wanted to learn a new language?

Maybe learn how to play the piano?

Improve your golf game by a few strokes?

But what’s the one thing that is always holding us back from really making that life change that would give us extra happiness?

We’re all guilty of this, myself included. We all have wasted minutes in our lives.

Don’t believe me?

Let’s do a quick exercise.

I’m going to tally up the hours in a standard day that the average working person spends doing standard tasks. I’ll even round UP on a lot of these time frames to illustrate the point further.

Sleep - 8 hours. I know many of you are probably throwing your heads back in laughter here. “Eight hours??? I’m lucky if I get six!” Remember, I’m rounding up here to cover as many people in this example as possible.

Work - 8 hours. For some of you, this may be more or less. We’re going standard.

Commute - 2 hours. If you work from home, congratulations! You get to keep these two hours. We’re rounding up to prove a point.

Morning routine - 1 hour. Eating breakfast, drinking coffee, showering, getting the kids ready for school, etc.

Lunch break - 1 hour. Some of you take a lunch break, some of you don’t.

Dinner - 1 hour. More or less the average.

Workout - 1 hour. Optional, but used by many.

Leisure - 1 hour. Netflix, reading, playing with the kids, glass of wine, etc.

Total: 23 hours

Leftover: 1 hour

We just built out a day in which we rounded up the timeframe for most of these activities.

For example, the National Institute of Health reports that the average American gets less than 7 hours of sleep per night. We went with 8.

If you work remotely, you spend zero hours on commute. We went with 2.

If you eat lunch while you work or eat for less than an hour, that’s more time saved.

If you’ve skipped the workout a few times, that’s another hour back in your pocket.

And guess what?

This was for a workday!

If it’s the weekend or an off day for you, add 10 hours back to your time bank. No work or commute!

Now that we know how much time we’re wasting in a day, how can we reinvest that time into a goal and make our life a little more perfect?

Let’s pretend you’ve always wanted to learn a new language.

Seems impossible with the busy life you have, right?

But we’ve just found extra time in our weekly schedule that can be reinvested.

The US Foreign Service Institute calculates that it takes an average of 480 hours of learning and practice to become fluent in a “Group I” language such as Spanish, French or Italian.

Our exercise above just found one extra hour per day for the “average” person.

If that average person spent that one extra hour per day on learning a new language, they would be fluent in 16 months.

If you can find an average of 90 minutes free in your daily schedule (don’t forget the weekends)… guess what?

You’re fluent in a new language in under a year!

The gap between the life we have and the life we want isn’t that we don’t have enough time.

It’s that we’re wasting it.

What’s one thing you wish you could change in your life right now?

Are you investing one leftover hour per day on that?

I’ll leave you with this graphic, which hit me like a ton of bricks the first time I saw it. I hope it gives you as much perspective on life’s ticking clock as it did for me.

This visual shows the life of someone who is 40 years old. The red circles represent each month of their life that has been spent already. The white circles represent all they have left.

Each circle is only A MONTH!

There’s no erasing these circles. They’re filled with ink.

What can you change in your life right now to make sure those circles aren’t filled with regret?

Whenever you’re ready, there are two ways I can help you make a change today:

Schedule a call with me so we can discuss your dream role and help you get there.

Or, check out my website to see some of the programs I offer to help people land their dream roles.