# Gimme 20! How Just 20 Minutes a Day to Yourself Could Transform Your Life

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[[ReadWise]]
## Metadata
- Author: [[Amy Fleming]]
- Full Title: Gimme 20! How Just 20 Minutes a Day to Yourself Could Transform Your Life
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/mar/05/how-just-20-minutes-a-day-to-yourself-could-transform-your-life

## Highlights
- life’s to-do list will never be complete; that spending time doing whatever you want will help you get everything else done; that it’s not selfish, but actually practical.
- I just take my time, and it is very, very rewarding,”
- It would be less practical to do this once the day has begun in earnest, and the morning is a good time to insulate yourself against stress. “When you wake up, your cortisol levels are super high,” he says. “I don’t need any additional stress in my life, so I want to take it easy.”
- Don’t feel bad about briefly stepping away from work, parenting or caring,
- People have to see that taking a break is part of their work. You can’t do your work unless you can get away from it, so that you have the energy and your brain is clear.”
- need to justify our existence with work, asks Moore. “Work is not the only thing that we do in life – taking a break gives us our humanity.”
- If you don’t schedule those 20 minutes, says Herbert, “it will take effort and willpower to try to make it happen, and finding that time will become a hassle.”
- To make it work, you’ll need to schedule your entire day
- Prepare what you’ll need the night before (if Herbert is going for a run, she’ll make sure her outfut is laid out, headphones fully charged) to “reduce the friction”, she says.
- Treat time like cash, not credit
- stricter with how we guard our time. A sense of time poverty can be brought on by what he calls a fundamental bias in how we perceive time
- you have cash in your hand, you can count it, it’s quantifiable. But you can’t see or feel time, or put a real value on it. Because time is invisible, we have a hard time accounting for it.”
- “Don’t worry about whether you’re wasting the time or using it well. If it’s something that you enjoy, it is time well spent,