Welcome to 2024. It’s 357 days til Christmas. Google says we also have 6,069 waking hours (if we sleep 7 hours/night) and 102 ten-minute segments daily.

Our choices of how to spend this time are endless: We can thrift or throw away what we no longer use, call a friend, bake cookies, wash the bathroom mirrors, take a nap, walk, clean our sock drawer, be cranky or pleasant, etc. The choices are ours.

The good thing about looking forward is that we can maximize our most precious commodity—time. When a day is over, we never get it again. We get one chance for each day. More importantly, we get one chance for each minute. Listen to the tick-tock of a clock; seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years are continually on the move. We lose them whether we enjoy them or not. If every minute was a dollar, I doubt if anybody would choose to lose $1,020.00 each day.

Let’s only look at the 102 ten-minute daily segments. I challenge all of us to take a few of these ten-minute time slots to do something meaningful: turn phones off and visit with people, write in a journal, slow down and taste our food, close our eyes and listen to music, write a thank you, sing, visit someone who’s not well, read, sit, dance, or spend ten minutes meditating and being alone with yourself.

Ten conscious minutes can bring immense joy to one’s life and improve overall quality. We can all find several ten-minute opportunities each day. Ten minutes is nothing out of the 1020 waking minutes we get daily.

Choose a time in your day and set your phone timer for 10 minutes. You will be amazed at how long ten minutes can last and, at the same time, how fast they fly.

Start with one ten-minute time frame in the morning, then add another in the afternoon, and then add another in the evening; that is 30 minutes each day to improve YOU and 2024.

And it costs nothing.

Begin this year knowing you alone can enhance your mood, build your self-esteem, and heighten your overall quality of life. And it can all begin with 10 minutes.

I’m closing with two quotes. One by Harvey Mackay, seven-time New York Times best-selling author: “Time is free, but it’s priceless. You can’t own it, but you can use it. You can’t keep it, but you can spend it. Once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.”

The second is by Benjamin Franklin, credited for creating the American dream: “Time is money . . . Waste it now. Pay for it later.”

Until the next time: Live while you live.

Jennifer Goble, Ph.D., LPC, is the author of “My Clients…My Teachers,” and the blogger and writer of Rural Women Stories: www.ruralwomenstories.com.

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