What would you do if you had an extra 91 hours right now? Seriously, if you could wave a magic wand and pause the world for 91 hours nonstop, what would you do? Let’s up the ante a bit; during that 91 hours you would not have to sleep, go to the bathroom, eat, answer a phone call, nothing. The world would literally be paused. Now what would you accomplish? What project would you finally start or even finish? What household chore is just lingering around for you to finish? Is there a project at work that you could complete? What if I told you that you can have as many of these 91 hour “pause sessions” as you would like, then what? You can and it is all based upon a purpoted quote by Albert Einstein. It is rumored that Einstein said…

“Compounding Interest is the most powerful force in the universe.”

The idea is that small incremental additions to a larger sum, can create huge dividends over time. And that is what we are going to apply right now.

Here’s how to do it in 3 steps.

1. Decide what task/project you would like to begin on. Whatever your answers were to my earlier questions just pick one. Trust me, at the end of 90 hours you’ll be further along than you imagined.

2. Grab a timer, stopwatch, clock in the dining room, whatever and time yourself for 15 minutes. During this 15 minutes do not let anything disturb you. If the phone rings, don’t answer it. Don’t check email, go to the bathroom, grab a bite to eat or anything else. Once your 15 minutes of solid work time is up, stop working!

3. Repeat at least once a day for 365 days. If you dedicate this small amount of time each day, over the course of the year you would have banked over 91 hours of solid, uninterrupted work time on your task. Of course you don’t have to wait 365 days. You could do two 15-minute sessions and cut down your time frame to 6 months.

Why does this work? Because for most people 15 minutes is an invisible unit of time. I’ve coached many professionals and have watched them waste 15 minutes of time setting up the desktop icons, windows, and applications layout on their computer. Many times, our projects and tasks never get done because the whole scope of completion seems so big. Even the idea of breaking things down into sub-tasks, major steps, etc. seems insurmountable. With that, comes a hesitation borne of the fear of failure to complete the said project/task. So how does a normal person respond? They respond by procrastinating until they “have time” to complete it. Which as we all know, never comes. But if we instead leverage our psycho-emotional levers, by pledging 15 minutes to just start working on a project, we eliminate the fear of not completing it. Now our only internal commitment is to just start.. It may not seem much at first. And indeed it isn’t. In fact, it takes 4 sessions before you even put an hour of work into the project. But if you look back over your week. That is an hour that previously didn’t exist for you. Plus, it is a pure hour that wasn’t interrupted for anything. An hour where you were completely focused on your task at hand. Do this over the year and you will have put over 2 weeks of pure uninterrupted, focused time into your work.

Trust me, once you do this faithfully just once, you’ll never let go of this trick. I guarantee it. Try it and tell me how it works!

–Warrior