The Power in one hour–1

It is the start of a New Year. Many of us are thinking about how we will do things differently than we have done them in the past.  Hopefully, you have set some meaningful goals for yourself and are looking to have your best year ever.

Last year, I thought about how much I can actually do or accomplish in one hour.  And over the next few months, or maybe throughout the year, I am going to write about my experiences with what I can successfully do in one hour.  I am going to use a lot of examples to make the point along the way, but I plan on speaking about my own experiences, and I will also use events and topics, to make the point of how powerful an hour really can be when we use it to our advantage.

How many hours a year do we waste?  I know some of the things below are necessary, however, I want to get you thinking about how many hours we actually do have to do certain things.   Here are some random statistics of how many hours we use to do certain things throughout the year.

• According to Adobe and some research they conducted with more than 1,000 white collared workers.  They estimated that on average a person was spending 4.1 hours day checking email.  Which adds up to  20.5 hours a week.
• Data Company Inrix studied traffic in 240 US cities and found that on average all commuters spend about 42 hours a year in traffic.
• People spend almost 1,000 hours year online, according to figures from the Oxford Internet Survey. For the average Facebook user, more than 70 hours of that is spent on the social networking site. Combining TV, computer, smart phone and tablet use, we spend an average nine hours a day staring at screens.
• The average household spends 1,460 hours a year watching television. An average of four hours a day.
• The average person spends just 50 minutes a week (43 hours a year) on exercising and working out according to figures from WeightWatchers.
• We spend 39 minutes a day, which is 237 hours a year. Each day we spend seven minutes 20 seconds on breakfast, 12 minutes 49 seconds at lunch and 19 minutes having dinner.
• O2 found we spend 119 minutes a day – that’s 724 hours a year – making calls, browsing the internet, texting and listening to music, but just 97 minutes with our partners.
• We spend 208 hours each year making sure our homes our clean.

Statistics above pulled from an article by the Daily Mirror.  Check this article out here 

I am not here to tell you what to do with your hours.  Many of you are already justifying how you spend your hours and after reading the above stats, you are now justifying them even more.

Now that we have laid out some ground work of how we spend some of our hours.  How do we take the hours we have and get the most out of them.  And what can we actually accomplish in one hour?

Here is my first example.

I have been a runner for many years now.  I run close to five days a week, and sometimes even six or seven.  It just depends on how my other workouts go. Some days I have long runs that require me to be out longer than one hour, but for the most part I like to stay within that one hour timeframe when I workout.

One hour a day is 4% of your day.  Lets do the math here: 60 minutes in an hour.  There are 24 hours in a day.  So 60 mins X 24 = 1,440 minutes a day.  You with me.  Now take the 60 mins. and divide it by 1,440.  And it equals .041666667.  Move the decimal over two spots and you are roughly at 4%.

Lets just assume that most days I spend the one hour running.  I may do several combinations of different runs that look like this.

• A really fast run would include all out sprint: I would do roughly 7.30 miles in one hour, which is a about an 8 min per mile pace.  During that run I would burn about 1,175 calories or so.
• A run/walk would consist of a 3 mile run for about 27 minutes and then walk for 2 miles (15 min pace) and I would burn about 840 calories or so.
• Walk only (15 min pace) I would do about 4 miles and burn about 560 calories or so.

If I just did the walk five days a week for one hour.  Which by the way is a very slow pace, most people can do this pretty easily.

I would burn 2,800 calories a week and 145,600 a year.  They say that a pound is equal to about 3500 calories. Who says?  The experts.  Just go with it for now.

If you were looking to maintain your weight or even lose weight, if you just did this exercise, and only ate the amount of calories you need to stay healthy, you would lose 41.6 pounds a year.  145,600/3500 = 41.6.

A lot of math here but I think you get the point.  And the point I want to make and that I will be making with my future blog posts with similar titles is this:

One hour a day towards something is not a lot a sacrifice, but it can have a great impact on your life.  

In my case, when I really workout and sprint for one hour and push the 7 mile or more mark, and burn 1,100 hundred calories, I feel so good for the rest of that day.  And the benefits to my overall health is so beneficial as well.

Here is my challenge for you today?  What is one area of your life where you could cut one hour a day from?  Maybe it is in one of the categories above where I described how much time the average person is spending in one of those areas.  Maybe that category is necessary for your life.  If it is, how can you do something else while you do whatever that task is.  I will be writing more about this in the future.

One hour a day is only 4% of your day. If you subtract sleep (8 hours) and work (8 hours) and you just say you have eight hours of free time a day.  Then this one hour is only 12% of your free time.  What I do in one hour of time for my health and well-being is probably one of the most important things I do all day, and it only takes 4% of my day or at the most, 12% of my free time.

To your success and your future.