285. Crumb Time

<p>“Crumb time” is the little pieces of time that get lost throughout the day. Instead of giving away your crumb time to unproductive distractions, build systems that complete big projects with small actions. Today, I’ll tell you how.</p> <p>Crumb time is everywhere throughout our days. Whenever we do something substantial with our time, little chunks of time of various sizes and shapes fall to the floor.</p> <h3>What is crumb time?</h3> <p>Crumb time has a combination of the following qualities:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Short amounts of time.</strong> Crumb time can be less than a minute, or several minutes.</li> <li><strong>Unknown lengths of time.</strong> You often don’t know when your crumb time will be over. It could end in a few seconds, or a few minutes.</li> <li><strong>Distracting environments.</strong> It’s hard enough to focus when you don’t know when you’ll be interrupted, but the environments in which crumb time take place are often noisy, with lots of activity.</li> </ul> <p>Some examples of crumb time:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Standing in line at an airport:</strong> Lots is going on, you’re waiting for your boarding call.</li> <li><strong>Riding in a cab:</strong> The scenery is changing, but you might have a good idea how much time you have.</li> <li><strong>Waiting for a friend to meet you for lunch:</strong> They could come in the door in two seconds, or twenty minutes.</li> </ul> <h3>Why do we give away crumb time?</h3> <p>Crumb time feels insignificant, and we think we need a controlled environment and a big block of time to do anything useful. You don’t have the time or mental bandwidth, it seems, to make substantial progress reading a book, or writing an article. So, we doomscroll on Twitter, blow off steam with a game such as Wordle, or do something pseudo-productive such as check email once again.</p> <h3>Productive uses of crumb time</h3> <p>We just give away our crumb time, but we could turn it into something useful. Here are some things you could do with crumb time:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Revie