Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for The Next Ten Minutes

My husband has a theory about the mercurial nature of happiness: unhappiness sprouts in minds stuck in "big time" while happiness blossoms in those that understand how to use "little time" to reach big-time goals.

Big-time thinkers—aka the miserable ones—focus on the year it will take to finish the project; the hundred-thousand good choices that need to be made to reach a healthy goal weight; and the thousands upon thousands of hours it will take to write a book, revise a book, shop and sell and pub a book.

Little-time thinkers focus on the next small step they can take right now to move toward the big goals they want to reach. And never mind that moving forward is inching forward. Forward is forward is forward.

The year I spent as a freelance writer I understood this. I took on way more than I could reasonably finish in an eight-hour workday. Scratch that. I took on more than I could reasonable finish in a twelve-hour workday. I realized quickly that focusing on the the many deadlines advancing toward me like the push of humorless troops armed with pocket watches and metaphorical whips was a recipe for hyperventilation, so to preserve a regular breathing pattern, I developed a system: I filled my to-do list with 30-minute project chunks and set an alarm. Each time the buzzer bleated, I crossed an action item off instead of waiting a month to cross the whole project off a much more stagnant list. I was still ridiculously overstretched, but I wasn't hyperventilating. That's the second ingredient in a happy life, I think. A distinct lack of hyperventilation.

So I know that little time works in theory. Set a realistic goal and then forget all about the big project as you focus on the little chunks you can do now. Little time isn't exactly a new thought. Some thinker that came before both my husband and I coined the idea that the only way to eat an elephant was one piece at a time. But I need the occasional refresher course.

Yesterday, for example.

I've been so focused on sprinting to the healthy me, that I didn't notice the storm brewing--all of a sudden I realized that there's very little wiggle room for human frailty in my diet. Cookies. There's no room for cookies. Or hand-cut french fries. Or yellow cake with buttercream frosting from Party Favors. Or chicken tikka masala. The cravings were likely a figment of the period that started this morning (and there's mention of that again, boys), but the thinking that I'd never have any of these things again was very real. Wrongheaded, but real.

Enter Mike's little time theory. He pointed out that I've been locked into big time on this, and so obsessed with getting to the first weight-loss benchmark by Christmas that I've pumped up the exercise and pared back the calories so far that there's not much wiggle room for anything but perfection. And two pounds a week is a lot when you've already burned off 34 pounds.

"Just make good choices for the next ten minutes, and everything else locks into place."

So in that ten mintues, I recalculated my daily calorie range based on a more humane goal of losing 27.5 pounds by January, 2011. Pushing the date 14 months into the future makes big-time me a little crazy, but little time me will be all the happier for it.

How much more happily productive would I be if I could remember to be grateful for the next ten minutes in all my projects? If organizing the house was a series of little time triumphs. If revising the book was a series of ever-smaller chunks: sections or scenes or paragraphs. Can I get a word by word? A letter by letter?

Today I'm grateful for Mike's reminder that life is too big to be squandered in big-time anxiety. That life is lived, moment-by-moment, in the little-time now. Today I'm grateful to focus on what I can do in the next ten minutes.