Tag Archives: habits

Will in About a Boy with his “units of time” and all of our lives lived in 15-minute increments

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

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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.

Scaffolding assignments for class, scaffolding tasks in life

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As I do some final planning for courses this semester, I was reminded of the scaffolded final assignments I now have in each class. These involve having multiple steps that contribute to a final product, usually a research paper, at the end of the semester. At each point, students work on a portion of what will be the final product and receive feedback. I have generally found this helps lead to better final projects and more learning over the course of the semester compared to having a big assignment due at the end with little preparation or feedback beforehand.

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But this is not just for school assignments. This is often helpful for getting tasks done. People might go about this in different ways. Imagine doing a little of a task each day – such as cleaning one level of a house – and it adds up to being done. Or working hard on something for a set amount of time and then taking a short break before going back to the task. Or putting in practice time each day and it adding up to more in the long run. Indeed, how often do we set out to accomplish something that goes beyond a simple task and get it all done in one sitting? It may be possible – but scaffolding often helps.

What if one important skill to be learned here is how to learn how to break complex tasks into manageable steps over time? Being able to consider a task, see how it can be effectively subdivided, finding the time to do those parts, reflecting on the progress after each part is completed, and then putting it all together into a final product. A classroom can provide an opportunity to practice this with some guidance.