Reclaim dead time
In his book Someday is Today, Matthew Dicks talks about the value of the minutes we let go off as "dead time". These mini-chunks of time are everywhere if we start looking:
- Waiting for your turn at the clinic
- Standing in line at the store
- Fuming at the 10 minutes you've been left waiting for a date
- On a commute
To stave away the boredom, Many of us (including me) tend to default to scrolling through our phones during "dead time". But Dicks suggests planning for these chunks of time that will inevitably appear in our day, and making use of them intentionally. In his book, he talks about how he met an aspiring writer who complained about not having time to work on her writing. He then reveals to her that in the 7 or so minutes that she was late to their meeting, he had written a few sentences for a book he'd been working on.
A few sentences may not seem like much, but when you add these blocks up, you get paragraphs, then pages, chapters till you get...a book.
That doesn't mean that uninterrupted blocks of time no longer matter. They do! But their absence is no longer so insurmountable an obstacle, if we chip away at our projects with these pockets of time. (Of course, stuffing every lull also kills any possibility for stillness or silence, but that's a balance we all learn to strike by doing.)