When saving money, one incentive to encourage people to save their money is the concept of compounding interest. We can invest money and have it work for us and it will grow, the earlier we do this, the better it is. Time works the same way. Time compounding is a simple concept, in the simplest form it can explained like this: 10 minutes 6 days a week adds up to 52 hours a year. While we do not have more time now or later, and can’t “invest” it to have more time later in a literal sense. There are; however, ways to make our time work for us. We can invest in activities that will create more time later. Below are ways understanding compounding time can be helpful.
- Finish books. We can open a huge book of over 1,000 pages and never even bother to start. However, when compartmailzed in smaller portions, it is much easier to accomplish. This also works for writing a book. I used this technique for reviewing my journals.
- Any fitness goal. Trying to lose weight? Gain weight? Run a certain time? Bench a certain amount? All of these things take little by little and consistency. You won’t achieve any of these by doing them 20 hours straight.
- Learning a skill or concept. I have heard that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at something. While this may be true to an extent, I am sure this varies a lot based on the skill and the person. It may take shorter or longer. What is always consistent is that the skill won’t happen overnight.
- Big projects. The concept of project management comes into play with this. It is all about planning out smaller tasks in achievable amounts of time so that something great is accomplished. This adds an additional aspect of having multiple team members as well, which in a way is a way to increase the amount of hours you have to accomplish something (this is the case if you are the owner)
As they said, Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your book, your muscles, your business or job, or anything else. It is also important to not get discouraged when small steps seem too small. Remember all of these little things do add up.