One thing I find that keeps coming up every time I try to do something new in life is that when you’re doing something for the first time, it is so slow.
It takes ten times as long, a hundred times as long, to do a simple thing.
The first time is the hardest by far.
And sometimes this can get in the way.
If I’m starting something and it just seems to take so much time, it seems like I’ll never be able to do this in any reasonable time.
I’ll never be able to actually make it useful, because if it takes my whole day just to do some simple thing, then I’ll never be able to do it productively.
Because when we’re imagining the future, we imagine it continuing as the past has been.
Usually that makes sense as the default way to imagine what the future will be like: more of what we have in the present.
So if it takes you 10 hours to accomplish a simple task, and you imagine this is something you want to do every day, well, then it seems like you’d have to spend 10 hours a day just to get this thing done.
Now, I experienced this when starting with all this Youtube social media stuff that I didn’t know anything about, and it just took so long just to learn how to do the most simple things.
I mean, my very first video, I just turned on the stream and published it and then wrote the transcript.
Just took a few minutes.
but then I learned about keywords and end screens and playlists, and then finally editing videos, and so a little 5-10-minute video ends up being more like an hour or more of work.
And the first one, I mean, I could spend all day just figuring out how to get one video done.
And then I project forward and think, well, I’m making a video every day.
If it takes me all day, I’m not gonna have any time for anything else.
The same idea with starting to work out.
I mean, when I was first starting to exercise, I had to research all these different exercises, and then I would learn how to do the different movements, and it just seems like an all-day project just to have an exercise session.
Learning how to improve diet: well, learning a new recipe, I could spend hours, and it just seems like it takes so long.
You know, instead of having convenient, easy meals, where I just, you know, pop it in the microwave or whatever, instead I have to select my vegetables, purchase my vegetables, wash my vegetables, peel my vegetables, chop my vegetables, cook my vegetables, eat my vegetables, clean everything up, and wow, it just seems like it becomes a full-time job just to make your dinner.
So if we imagine how long things take the first time you’re doing it, and then you project that out into the future, it would seem like, in order to get anywhere in improving life and living in a more wholesome way, you essentially have to dedicate your entire time to this kind of self-improvement and self-management, self-care tasks.
And it, of course, all feeds into the #1 easiest excuse to have to not take steps to improve ourselves, and that is simply to say “I don’t have time.
Too busy with all my responsibilities and the things I have to do anyway.
I simply do not have time to embark on this journey of self-development.
I’d love to.
Sounds great.
I don’t have the time.” But the good news is, the good side of it is, that this will all become more efficient over time.
So every time we do something new, there’s a huge inflation of the time involved, as we have to learn how to do it, and then we’re figuring out the motions of it.
But over time and repetitions, of course, once it gets baked into our routine, it can become something that is simply automatic, and something that only takes a short amount of time.
So exercise: an hour a day, even though it took many hours when starting to learn it.
Shooting and publishing a video like this: it does not need to take much more than an hour a day, once the whole system is sorted out.
Cooking food: I still have a long way to go in making my cooking more efficient.
It does seem to take a long time to chop vegetables.
But it doesn’t take all day, and for some recipes, you know, it’s just kind of an automatic thing, dash it off in an hour and it’s done.
So whenever we’re starting something new, we have to be ready to put in extra time, put in ridiculous amounts of time in preparing and learning and getting started in new things.
But I find it helpful to remember that, whatever time I’m spending on these simple basic things, it will be reduced over time, as I get used to them, I’ve become comfortable with them, become established, and have them built into my routine.
So what can seem like an impossible amount of work can become simply another part of a normal day, a better day.
#notenoughtime #newhabits #efficientlife