The power of an hour or two

I’ve long been fascinated by sonnets. In particular, I am drawn to the 14-line, iambic pentameter version, where the first and third lines rhyme, the second and fourth do, and so on until the last couplet rhymes on its own. Each line has 10 syllables with alternating emphasis. It is a very strict format, but within that structure there is freedom — a good combination for creative expression.

Anyway, I’ve written a few sonnets here and there over the years. I’ve wanted to write more — I even put “write a collection of sonnets” on my?2018 List of 100 Dreams?— but writing one is challenging and a full collection seemed daunting…until I came up with a new approach.

This year I decided to write two lines in a sonnet every single day. This never feels overwhelming. I’m only writing 20 syllables! It almost always takes less than five minutes (and often much less). But at this pace I am writing a sonnet a week (13 so far) and will have written 52 by New Year’s. I think that qualifies as a collection.?

The experience has reminded me of this:?There is great power in doing something just an hour or so a week.?Add in my other 2023 daily project — reading 10 pages a day of Jane Austen with the goal of reading her complete works by December — and I’m still spending less than 15 minutes a day on these rituals. That’s less than two hours each week. Small things done repeatedly add up.

Indeed, the more I study the work habits of truly prolific people, the more I see this truth.?You never have to do much. You simply have to be consistent.?Two hundred words a day of usable, related content, created 365 days per year, would be 73,000 words, or a book every year, which is ten a decade, twenty in two decades, and so forth — a rate of prolificacy that far surpasses most career authors.?

Adding an extra hour or two of anything a week could have a big impact. If you play an instrument and want to play more, adding a mere hour of practice — 20 minutes, three times a week — would lead to significant improvement. A regular runner who decided to build up to an extra two hours weekly of running time would be bumping the weekly mileage tally by at least 10 miles (on its own, the length of the long run you’d need to run to train for a half-marathon).?

You could read the Bible in a year in about an hour and change a week. Investing an extra hour a week in nurturing existing friendships could be transformative for them. Yet an hour or two a week is the equivalent of 9-17 minutes or so a day — what can feel like almost nothing. That is the time equivalent of change lost in the couch cushions.?

And so we do often lose those minutes. But captured, and applied consistently, they can make seemingly huge things possible. That is the power of an hour or two — a power that we all have the ability to harness.?