120% time – committing 8 hours a week

How do we make time for our endeavors?

To make progress at anything, you must allocate time.

I suggest allocating 8 hours a week, from 6:00 to 8:00, in the morning or the evening.

Google's 120% time

I recently read in the book The Long Game, by Dorie Clark, about how Google's 20% time where "You can spend 20% of your time on anything you think would most benefit Google" is actually 120% time: 100% time on your job, plus 20% extra time on it.

This got me thinking about 120% time – adding 20% time on top of the current 100%.

What if you spent 120% time? What if you spent an extra 20% of time on what would most benefit you?

And how do you go about doing it?

Schedule the time on your calendar

I'd love to do [X], but I have no time.
- Everyone

We all lack free time. Our time is all spoken for. I know.

I also know it's hard to commit to time alone. We go to the personal trainer appointment, but skip the gym on our own.

Since we don't allocate our time precisely, by knowing exactly how much time we intend to spend on which activities over the week, the best way to make time for an activity is to schedule it.

When you put something on the calendar, you create clear expectations that that time window is spoken for and can't be used for anything else.

While some people say, "I'll go to the gym when I can" or "I'll practice guitar when I feel like it," the only consistent way to make progress is to have a set time.

Every single day.

Something as high as 8 extra hours a week is actually a lot of hours. You need daily consistency to maintain such high load over long periods of time.

But if you maintain 8 hours a week, you can make enormous progress at almost anything.

8 hours a week should be enough for anybody

8 hours a week is equivalent to 400 hours a year. That is a lot of hours.

400 hours is enough to make progress on pretty much anything: learning AI, building your MVP product, learning the guitar, writing 100 blogposts, reading ~70 books, etc.

As the saying goes, we overestimate what we can achieve in a day but underestimate what we can accomplish in a year. Consistent effort over a year can lead to remarkable results.

If you can consistently allocate 8 hours a week to anything, you're at the top percentile of productivity.

But when should you schedule it?

Proposal: either 6am to 8am or 6pm to 8pm

Yes, of course you have stuff to do 6am to 8am now – that's the challenge, afterall! Taking kids to school, starting work early, house chores, etc, etc. I get it.

Yes, of course you have stuff to do 6pm to 8pm. Going to the gym, preparing dinner, house chores, relaxing after work, etc, etc. I get it.

The truth is that if you're gonna spend 2 hours a day on anything, it's probably gonna happen at one of these two windows: 6am to 8am or 6pm to 8pm. So you gotta pick one of them.

If you do 2 hours daily, you can do your activity from Monday to Thursday and get Friday off. If you have to skip a weekday, you can make up for it on Friday.

And never skip 2 days in the same week.

But what about your energy levels early at 6am, or right after work at 6pm?

Forget energy levels, focus on consistency

There's a quote by BJJ champion Gordon Ryan I really like:

Of course you can have motivation problems. We all have motivation problems. You just can't have discipline problems.

When you're having a high-energy day, make sure you do your activity.

And if you're having a low-energy day, make sure you do your activity.

No excuses.

Of course, energy levels make a big difference, and 400 hours of high energy can produce very different outcomes from 400 hours of low energy.

But in my experience, people's problem is they're just not putting in the time. Their tally over the past 12 months is nowhere near 400 hours. So that's the part you need to fix.

You can worry about optimizing those 400 hours later.

For now, worry about actually clocking those 400 hours.

Schedule 2 hours a day, 6am-8am or 6pm-8pm

In summary, that's the 120% time method for doing what you want:

1) Schedule the time on your calendar
2) 2 hours, either 6am-8am or 6pm-8pm
3) Monday through Thursday
4) If you skip a day, make it up on Friday
5) Never skip two days
6) Enjoy the outcomes of 400 hours of [X] in a year

So, are you looking to spend more time on a personal endeavor you don't have time for?

Start today: Pick a slot from 6am-8am or 6pm-8pm, and commit to it consistently.