If you’re anything like me, you spend a few minutes every hour away from your chosen task for that moment. It can be a few here, maybe two minutes, maybe six the next. Everyone does it, really. We all need to take a break at times, take a few moments and refresh the batteries.
Think about this, though. Besides the time you take to recharge, how many minutes a day are you truly wasting? A few minutes here and there can certainly add up. If you wasted just 5 minutes an hour, over an eight hour period, that would add up to 40 minutes per day. Per week, that’s about 3 hours, and by the end of one full year you would have wasted a 7-day vacation. Now that might not sound like a lot, but if you were to ask any hard working employee, those seven days of vacation could quickly become a godsend.
Trust me; my intent is not to offer you a guilt ride considering your work habits. Nor it is my intention to make your boss even more of a slave driver than he already may be. Rather, it is my true intention to make sure the importance of every minute, every moment in realized.
Here is another way to think about it. I know of a family that keeps a simple mason jar on top of the counter in the kitchen. Whenever one of them has a few pennies, or a few coins loose in their pockets, they drop the change into the jar. Is this something that your family does as well? If so, you know that over a few weeks or a month, the jar becomes full. Then, the jar gets taken down to the bank to make a deposit into a savings account. On average, that little Mason jar gave our neighbors about $45 per month. Multiply that by twelve, and you can see how they were able to have a huge summertime BBQ with the whole neighborhood, complete with a whole pig and all the sides and drinks that you could ever want.
Each moment in your life should be considered a precious commodity. Whether it is a minute here or a simple penny there, the idea that the little things don’t matter simply isn’t true. The next time you get a chance to talk with a veteran business owner, ask him what he does with his pennies. Chances are he’ll say, “I save them!”