Your next 8.760 hours

0:03Speaker 1:Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is to consider what you would like to do with the next 8,760 hours of your life. That is the number of hours in a year. And thinking about a year in terms of the next 8,760 hours, opens up a lot of possibilities. Today's tip, like several others this week, comes from my new book, Big Time, A Simple Path to Time Abundance. In the book, I talk about how zooming out and looking at time from a bigger perspective allows us to embrace the concept of time abundance.

0:52Speaker 1:After all, a lot more fits in 8,760 hours than in 24 hours. On any given day, it may be impossible to work a 12-hour shift, read books to your kids and put them to bed, train for a half marathon, and go out to dinner with friends. But it is possible to do those things many times over and a lot of other things, too, when we zoom out and consider the next 8,760 hours. Of course, to know how we should allocate those hours, we need to know what we want to do with them. One way to get at what you'd like to do in a year is to imagine yourself on today's date next year. What do you want to have achieved? Do you want to have read all the works of Shakespeare? Do you want to have gotten a promotion? Do you want to have run a half marathon, learned Spanish, landed a new job, helped your kid find a great fit college? When you know what you'd like to accomplish, figure out how many hours it might take to get there. For instance, I know from personal experience that reading all the works of Shakespeare takes less than 30 minutes a day if you do it every day for a year. That is about 180 hours, give or take. That is a mere 2.05% of a year.

2:09Speaker 1:If you plan on sleeping eight hours a night, it is 3.08% of your waking 5,840 hours. If you work 2,000 hours a year, which is 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, it is 4.69% of your waking, non-working hours. Still sounds pretty doable. If you want to land a new job, the amount of time you'll need for that is a little less predictable than Shakespeare. But you could decide that you will budget an hour every weekday for the project. That might mean scheduling an hour every Monday night for scouring job boards, an hour before work Tuesday through Thursday for sending out resumes, and an hour on your lunch break on Fridays for informational interviews. Not every week will look exactly the same, and hopefully you'll end up with some job interviews that consume some of the time you have budgeted. But you can translate the abstract desire for a new job into the time on your calendar to achieve your goals. So it goes for many things.

3:18Speaker 1:Maybe you decide you'd like weekly date night with your partner. That's about 100 hours a year. Totally doable. That's less time than most people spend on screens in a month. Want to travel with old friends? Two long weekend trips would total less than 144 hours. You just have to figure out when it fits in 8,760. You might want more time with hobbies. Maybe you can't paint every day. But with some intentionality, you can almost certainly find 50 hours over the course of a year. You could decide to spend two hours painting every other Sunday afternoon. Wouldn't that feel amazing? When we think about time in terms of days, it is easy to feel a sense of scarcity.

4:05Speaker 1:But when we zoom out and realize we have 8,760 more hours before we finish this loop around the sun, suddenly we realize that there is room to fit in a lot of experiences. So today I invite you to consider your next 8,760 hours. What would you like to accomplish? And what time do you need to invest to make that happen? I'd love to hear about your plans. You can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. In the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening. And here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.

4:59Speaker 1:If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thank you.