How to Expand Time
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
Step One — Get Moving
Do one small thing a day that could eventually make your life a little better. Don’t try to come up with a master plan. Don’t try to make sense of everything. Just focus on small activities that will move you forward. At some point, it might dawn on you that these actions are taking you in a particular direction. Then you may make course corrections to advance more quickly. But first, get moving.
Step Two — Exer-Work
As you get older, everything becomes harder and takes longer. Increasingly you need physical exercise for health, which leads to a time crunch — how can you spend an hour a day walking or jogging when there isn’t enough time in the day to do what you want and need to do?
To deal with this problem, I categorized my typical activities as maintenance, relaxation, exercise, or progress, and I kept track of when I did what. Then I modified how I characterized activities so they could do double duty, getting done what I needed to do and benefitting from the exercise of doing it.
Remember, God invented snow to shovel, grass to cut, and leaves to rake so you would be motivated to exercise. He also created dogs so you’d have good reason to walk.
Writing is part of who I am and what I do. So, I begin working on a project before going out to exercise. Then ideas occur to me naturally as I walk or jog. I bring along a notebook. And instead of the exercise being a boring chore, I enjoy it; and by the time I get home, I’m anxious to start writing again.
Step Three — You Don’t Need to Finish Everything at Once
Today’s computers are digital. They are based on only two possibilities — yes or no, on or off. But people are by nature analog, with a continuous range of possibilities. For us, little changes matter because they accumulate and take us where we want to go a little bit at a time.
