The Power of One Second
Seemingly nothing, but it adds up
One second isn’t much, but just like pennies, they add up. If you can save one second on a task that you do 10 times a day, in a year you’d save an hour. Over the next 48 years that would be 3 extra days worth of waking hours you’d have. So, 10 seconds a day = 3 days of life.
You may not think there is anything you do 10 times a day, but you should look for the items with the biggest time saved * frequency. I’ll give you some examples that I’ve applied in my life.
I brush my teeth twice a day. Each time I have to unscrew the toothpaste, put it down, pick up my toothbrush, paste my brush, put the brush back down, grab the cap, screw it back on, put it down, pick the brush back up, and finally I start brushing. A pretty trivial task starts to sound like quite an operation when you lay out all the steps. However, it probably only takes 10 seconds until I start brushing.
At some point I bought a toothpaste with a flip top. Now the steps look like this: I have to flip the top of unscrew the toothpaste, put it down, pick up my toothbrush, paste my brush, put the brush back down, grab the cap, flip the top screw it back on, put it down, pick the brush back up, and finally I start brushing. I eliminated four steps since I can do the toothpaste with one hand and flipping the top is faster. It saves 5 seconds twice a day. Now I have 3 more days worth of time. I have also flipped my soap to face backwards because it is quicker to pump that way.
One thing that consumes a lot of our time is our phone. We can argue whether that is enjoyable time or not, but there are still ways to optimize. If you used 2G internet, then you wouldn’t get a quarter as many things done on your phone. However, the one thing I wish was still available was the back of the phone fingerprint scanner. I probably unlock my phone 50 times a day. With the rear fingerprint scanner the phone was unlocked by the time I used it. However, with facial recognition it takes maybe a half second if perfect, maybe two seconds if it doesn’t quickly recognize me, but sometimes it needs my passcode and that’s five seconds. I’d say that was around 30 seconds to a minute a day of time saved by using the rear fingerprint.
One engineer had the right idea when deciding to buy a new laptop to save engineers’ idle time. The cost of their time sitting idle outweighed the cost of the new hardware. Read more here.
Your turn
So, you’ve seen some examples of how valuable seconds are, but you probably arn’t going to think right away which tasks you could shave some time off of. Instead, as you go about your day pause occasionally to think how long you are spending on tasks and how often you are doing it. You are just trying to identify tasks. Eventually you will build a list of items. Then you can quantify them and rank them by time per task * frequency and see what are the things you spend the most time on. Finally, consider if there is anyway you can optimize them.
The purpose is not to do everything as fast as possible. Sometimes you can’t or won’t want to. I don’t want to reduce the amount I sleep nor do I want to try to reduce the time I spend with my kids. What you are trying to do is eliminate the time you spend on things you dislike or are mundane so you can free time up for things you enjoy.