Fifteen-Seven

Just fifteen minutes a day can do you a world of good in a number of ways. If you spend just fifteen minutes looking at the outside of your home and fixing small things, you'll have a nicer home and yard soon. Spend fifteen minutes a day in the kitchen cleaning surfaces, and see how quickly your kitchen starts to look better to you. Spend fifteen minutes on a selected room each day. Spend fifteen minutes working to eliminate boxes full of junk in the room next door. I mean, for instance. Fifteen minutes might be the right amount of time for this activity. I know that I can work fairly well for about that long, or perhaps longer, making a 'keep' pile and being coolly unsentimental about the 'discard' pile. At a certain point, my brain becomes fogged; filled up with floating particles of styrofoam. This point can be recognized by me starting to justify keeping things, like 'Well, it's the only X I have. I should keep it as an example." At this time, I must stop sorting or trying to sort, because the next phase is removing discard items and putting them in with the keepers.

Fifteen minutes a day at your musical instrument will begin noticeable improvements in your abilities. Devote fifteen minutes to technique and sight-reading, work some scales, and read pieces of music you would't be interested in otherwise just to build your skills. Spend fifteen minutes diving through old books of music you brought home, thinking you'd play them one day. Spend time digging through big collections of songs and see how many unrecognizable titles went with familiar tunes whose names you never knew. (Caveat: You still might not know them, since those old collections have weird features like taking well-known bits of classical pieces and concocting a bogus 'song' from it--usually on some anodyne and vaguely indoctrinal topic.)

Fifteen minutes of exercise, taken regularly, will ease some of your physical shortcomings. Fifteen minutes a day of walking comes to less than two hours, and my doctor said 150 minutes a week was recommended, but hey! An hour and forty-five minutes might be an improvement. Be sure to plan your walk so that you have time to walk back, unless you plan on calling for help wherever you end up.

Spend fifteen minutes with your eyes closed. It's like a nap, but it doesn't matter if you fall asleep or not--you're just retiring your visual cortex for a while, and maybe listening to stuff. Set an alarm so you can wake up.

Spend fifteen minutes outside your four walls. Sit on your lawn furniture. Circumnavigate your block. Spend fifteen minutes taking photos. Or spend fifteen minutes deleting your worst old photos.

An unexplored possibility is to simply hoard the time. Save fifteen minutes every day by picking a time and skipping all activities that you'd have participated in during that time. Move everything after it up fifteen minutes, including going to sleep and getting up the next day. Do this enough times, and you'll have saved a whole day! 24 hours of "advantage: YOU!" It requires a certain amount of discipline, amounting to monomania, however, once you've mastered it, you'll have free time coming out your elbow.

.