How One Hour a Day Can Change Your Life

Most people believe that in order to make an important change in their lives—pursue their dream career, become a published author, find a way to create multiple streams of passive income, and so on—they need to have a large chunk of free time at their disposal. At the same time, few people have the luxury of taking a long sabbatical–lasting a year or more—which they can devote exclusively to achieving an important goal. However, in order to change your life, all that you really need is one hour a day.

Journalist Geoff Edgers, legal-thriller author John Grisham, and simplicity guru Elaine St. James are three examples of people who completely overhauled their lives starting with just one hour a day.  Read more about these people, and their application of the one-hour-a-day formula, below.

Geoff Edgers – Reuniting The Kinks

Geoff Edgers was a 38 year old man who had a good job—he was a reporter for the Boston Globe–, a nice house, and a loving family. However, he dreamed of making a movie. And not just any movie; he was obsessed with the British rock band, The Kinks. He wanted to reunite the members of the band—who had stopped playing together in 1996–and film a documentary about his quest. Geoff knew nothing about making movies, and he didn’t have the money to make the film.

Instead of giving up on his dream, he decided to spend an hour a day working on it. Three years later, he had made a documentary film called “Do it Again“.  It premiered at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam to smashing reviews. Geoff has this to say:

“If you wonder whether you could write a book or run a marathon, don’t waste a minute calculating your chances. Instead, spend an hour a day on your dream. It’s how I suddenly found myself on a bridge in London, cameras rolling, wondering what took me so long.” (Source.)

Geoff didn’t succeed in reuniting The Kinks, but he got his movie made.  He explains that he took the kind of risks that he hadn’t entertained since high school.  In addition, he indicates that although financing was a problem at the start, once he had a compelling cut investors were easier to find.  Carve out an hour a day for yourself and get the ball rolling on whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve.  Then, like Geoff, watch how things start falling into place.

John Grisham – From Lawyer to Bestselling Author

John Grisham is on Forbes’ 2010 list of the world’s 10 top-earning authors. However, at one time he was a young lawyer with a wife and a growing family, who worked long hours for little money, since his clients couldn’t pay. And he discovered that he didn’t enjoy the legal profession.

How did Grisham go from being stuck in a job he disliked–and which provided little remuneration in return for his hard work–to getting paid millions to do what he loves? He made the sacrifice of getting up each day at the crack of dawn, heading down to his office, making a pot of strong coffee, and sitting at his desk to work on his writing before his official workday began.

Grisham explains that “A Time to Kill” and “The Firm” were written over a five-year period, back-to-back, from about 1984 to about 1989. The bulk was written at five o’clock in the morning. He would write for an hour or two in the morning, get ready for court, and then go to court to stand in front of a judge and plead his clients’ cases. (Source).

Grisham says the following:

“The alarm clock would go off at 5, and I’d jump in the shower. My office was 5 minutes away. And I had to be at my desk, at my office, with the first cup of coffee, a legal pad and write the first word at 5:30, five days a week.”

His goal was to write a page every day. Sometimes that would take 10 minutes, and sometimes an hour or two. That’s how he got from where he was then, to where he is now: he has written 22 books that have sold over 250 million copies; ten of these books have been turned into movies, with an eleventh in development.

Elaine St. James – From Overwhelmed to Simplicity

Elaine St. James is well-known for her books on simplicity, such as “Inner Simplicity: 100 Ways to Regain Peace and Nourish Your Soul” and “Simplify Your Life: 100 Ways to Slow Down and Enjoy the Things That Really Matter”.  However, it took her a while to understand that “less is more”.  In 1990, she was a successful real-estate investor, with properties in southern California and Connecticut. She also ran a thriving seminar business and was the author of a popular book on real-estate investing.

St. James admits that she wasn’t satisfied with her real-estate business, and that she was working ten to twelve hours a day. In addition, her large country home took endless hours to upkeep, and her husband had to endure a four-hour daily commute to and from work.

She realized that she had lost sight of her true priorities, and that she needed time to think about the changes that she wanted to make in her life.  St. James concluded that it takes time to make time.  She adds the following: “You can’t figure out how to create time for the things you enjoy if you don’t take time to rethink what you’re doing now. Maintaining a complicated life is a great way to avoid changing it.”

St. James explains that the first step toward simplifying your life is to free up one hour a day for 30 days.  In order to be able to do this, she started working one hour less a day.  She vowed to devote that time to re-examine her life and to create a plan on how she could spend her time doing the things which she truly enjoyed. St. James adds that you should use this time to ask yourself questions such as the following:

• What is it that’s most complicating my life?
• Am I working too hard?
• Am I working at a job I don’t like?
• Where is my time going?
• Are material possessions cluttering up my life?
• How and what can I cut back?

As a result of taking that one-hour-a-day for thirty days, St. James and her husband got rid of the material possessions which cluttered their home and added little to their enjoyment of life. They moved across the country, into a house that was close to her husband’s office and was easier to maintain. Additional small steps, taken over time, added up to an extra 30 hours per week. St. James says, “It’s hard to put a price tag on that much time.” (Source).

Put Your Hour in Your Schedule

Once you’ve decided to take an hour-a-day in order to re-examine your life, or to work on a life-long ambition, make sure that you schedule that hour into your appointment book. The best strategy is to schedule your hour as the first thing you work on each day. Do it before you check your email, or your voicemail, or your papers, or your list of tasks. Do it first. Whatever your initiative is, if you work on it for an hour, every day, it will progress.

Treat your appointment with yourself as your sacred hour. Make sure that you let others know that you are not to be disturbed during this time. When you make an appointment with your boss or with some other important person in your life, you keep that appointment. You have to treat your hour with yourself with the same respect.

Go ahead.  Start changing your life by investing one hour a day.

(Time Ticking Away is courtesy of Michel Filion)

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