I Tracked Every Second of My Day For An Entire Month…Part 1
And it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Okay, it may be just a bit hyperbolic to say EVERY second of my day for an entire month, but I was able to craft out every day by the hour. In doing so, I spent the last 30 days of my life free from so many of life’s usual distractions.
“Time is what we want most, but use the worst”
- William Penn
Like many of us, I found myself constantly complaining that there weren’t enough hours in a day. Every day seemed to consist of the same predictable routine - wake up, maybe get a workout in, rush to get ready for the day, work 8-10 hours, spend a little time with family, wish the day was longer, go to sleep, repeat. To make the daily monotony seem even more mundane, we just lived the last year and some change in the midst of a global pandemic that kept us confined to our homes, making it even easier to do the same thing every day. Because of this, I found myself becoming more and more aware of time - more aware that I wasn’t using my time here on this earth the way that I should. I found myself lying in bed at night asking why didn’t I do more? Why didn’t I spend more time with my family? Why didn’t I start a YouTube channel? Why didn’t I FaceTime friends more often?
In order to get myself to sleep at night, I kept telling myself the same thing - there’s just not enough time in the day. Maybe one day you’ll be able to fit it in.
But eventually, I caught on to my own lie.
If you’ve never been introduced to Matt D’Avella, I hope you find his YouTube Channel just as life-changing as I have. Over the last year and a half, I have been following Matt and his channel, which has ultimately led me down the rabbit hole of self-development, productivity, and minimalism (shoutout Jav for introducing me to Matt, minimalism, and habit formation). I first watched the video above sometime last fall. I thought that planning out my entire day would be pretty cool, but there was no way that it would benefit me at all - because after all, my day was pretty typical and I didn’t have any spare time anyway.
This video circled back around to me as I was gearing up to start Matt’s Simple Habits course from Slow Growth Academy. At the start of the course, you’re tasked with coming up with a habit that you want to build, and over the next 30 days, challenged with sticking with it, building a system that you can carry on well after the 30-day mark. For me, the habit I wanted to build was quite clear. I was tired of living in the lie that there wasn’t enough time. I didn’t want to spend my days hoping for more than 24 hours. I wanted to finally control what I knew I could control all along - my time.
Once I found my “why” I knew I had the motivation to make it happen.
I want to take control of my time. I want to live more intentionally. Spend more time with the people that matter the most to me. Spend more time doing the things that matter the most to me. I’m tired of complaining that there isn’t enough time. I’m tired of living the lie that life is just too busy. By not planning out my days, I’m failing to capture the day’s potential. I’m throwing a way the valuable resource that I ironically keep saying there’s not enough of. But… By planning out my days, I know that I’ll find that there is, in fact, more time in the day. While time may be finite, there is a much more ample supply of it - you just have to be willing to work for it. Life is short. That’s why it’s time to start making the most of it.
- My Why (From Exercise 4 of the Simple Habits Course Workbook)
My “why” became my guiding north star on my journey for change. It was finally time to make a change. And from that moment, when I first penned my “why” at People’s Coffee in Durham, NC, my life was forever changed, all because of the simple decision, to make a simple habit a part of my life.
Now, a little over a month later, I am still going strong. I put in the work even when it wasn’t always convenient. I wasn’t always perfect. Some days, I forgot to plan, but the very next day, I got back at it, remembering the two-day rule (thanks again, Matt). And through struggling through this challenge, fumbling to find the “perfect” method, I realized something so profound yet so simple.
Planning out your day really isn’t that hard.
In fact, after a little bit of practice and tweaking the method that works for me, I found that it was actually pretty simple and takes about less than 10 minutes a day.
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself that either I’m WAY too type A or you’re not type A enough. While the former may be true in some instances, I will now argue that you don’t have to be type A at all for my method of scheduling to work for you. All you need is a touch of desire to take back your time (your “why”) a Google calendar, and a little bit of time each day. The rest is pretty simple.
But we’ll save that for next week. Next Tuesday, we’ll dive into my method of planning out my days. I’ll share with you what I’ve found to work best for me. You’ll get all the details from how I create multiple calendars to organize my life, how I use time blocking to make scheduling a lot more efficient, to how I’ve learned to integrate Calendly into my personal life to make scheduling time outside of my normal day-to-day easier.
And while it may seem overkill, I hope that after next week, you realize that there really is more time. You can spend that extra 30-minutes with your partner. You can take your kid to the pool. You can enjoy a nice cocktail with some friends on a Tuesday night. You may even find time in your day to start a blog, writing about the things that interest you!
In the meantime, I encourage you to check out Matt’s Simple Habits course. I’m not sponsored by Matt in any way. I’m not making any money off this blog or getting a free course. In fact, I’ve never even talked to him (although I’m holding on to hope that one day it’ll happen). I’m simply just passing along a resource that has completely changed my life and way of thinking. Not to mention, Matt’s video content and biceps (IYKYK) are both equally solid! Whether you invest financially in Matt’s course or invest your time into his incredible catalog on YouTube, I guarantee you’ll find value in all of it.
Maybe your why might be different. Maybe you want to eat healthier, read more, floss your teeth every day. All of that can happen by taking a step towards building one small habit that can compound over time. You might just have to put in a little work to get to that point.
You just have to start.
See ya next week!
