How do you spend your 1,000 minutes?

I find it helpful to think of time as an inventory:

Your day is divided into Sleep Time and Awake Time.

We all have about 16 waking hours or roughly 1,000 minutes to work with each day.

So we can divide Awake Time into 3 buckets — what I call the “WPP Framework”:

1) Work: Job, school, family requirements, chores

2) Passion: personal projects, side gigs, hobbies

3) Play: unstructured, guilt-free play time

If we work first and play later, we can stay on top of our responsibilities.

… And we don’t have to get stuck in a crunch staying up all night, procrastinating, engaging in avoidance behavior, and having to deal with last-minute panic.

This is a “molehill” approach as opposed to a “mountain” approach: Stay on top of things every day, the first chance you get, before goofing off.

… But our brain is also like a sponge.

So… at some point, it gets saturated and needs time to decompress or “evaporate.” Whether that’s evening after work or weekends when we have more free time.

Otherwise, we become subject to burnout and chronic stress.

On the other side…

If all we do is work and play, that leaves out the opportunity to grow ourselves as human beings. And to engage in good experiences outside of our required work (including education) and goofing off.

Looking at time as an inventory and then breaking that up into 3 individual “buckets” — work, passion, play — allows us to take our volumes of responsibility, pull out specific tasks to do…

… And sequence those into our days so that we can knock out our responsibilities first.

Then, we “pay ourselves first” before goofing off with personal passion activities.

And finally, enjoy some 100% guilt-free downtime, knowing that we accomplished what we set out to do.

So, recap:

1) Work first

2) Pay yourself before goofing off

3) Then enjoy guilt-free downtime

This approach creates balance.

Work all day = workaholic.

Goof off before work = time tends to slip away.

Goof off all day = couch potato.

Only do work and play = no personal growth & development.

This balance ensures your 1,000 minutes are well spent.

Dan

P.S. — Over the past 10 months, I’ve created 12 workshops on business and productivity…

Hundreds of people are using these exact systems and frameworks right now…

And they’ve been ...