In the movie version of About a Boy, the adult character Will describes his life as lived in “units of time”:

The important thing in island living is to be your own activities director.
I find the key is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than 30 minutes.
Full hours can be a little bit intimidating and most activities take about half an hour.
Taking a bath: One unit.
Watching Countdown:
Okay.
One unit.
Web-based research:
Two units.
Exercising: Three units.
Having my hair carefully disheveled: Four units.
It’s amazing how the day fills up.

In the movie, this looks somewhat depressing. Perhaps it is a coping mechanism. Will claims he is fine living alone but the story involves him finding value in relationships with several people who would not expect to have relationships with.

But what if all of us live in small increments of time that add up to weeks, months, years, decades. From the end of a recent article on declining social engagement in American life:

When Epley and his lab asked Chicagoans to overcome their preference for solitude and talk with strangers on a train, the experiment probably didn’t change anyone’s life. All it did was marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time. But life is just a long set of 15-minute blocks, one after another. The way we spend our minutes is the way we spend our decades. “No amount of research that I’ve done has changed my life more than this,” Epley told me. “It’s not that I’m never lonely. It’s that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I’ve learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it.”

What if life is a series of 15-minute blocks where our choices with those blocks can add up to profoundly different outcomes? In the example above, start socializing each day in one 15-minute increment and see what it can lead to. This is the narrative in numerous self-improvement and habit books: build small new routines and change your life.

Keeping track of every 15 minutes in life would be laborious and could turn someone into a clock watcher rather than an active participant in life. Yet, time use does indeed add up and broad changes in time use – such as watching more television – can have big impacts.