Grab your coffee and sit with me for a minute. I already know what you’re going to say, and I have to stop you right there.

You’re thinking, “Are you serious? What spare time? Have you looked at my week?” I hear you, and yes, I see your calendar ~ it’s terrifying…and you still have spare time hiding in there.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best:

“Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life.”

Uncut diamonds. Not the polished kind in the jewelry case, the dull, lumpy rocks you’d kick aside if nobody told you what they were worth. That’s the loose four minutes before a call starts. I’ve thrown those rocks out by the handful, and odds are you have too.

The thing no one prints on a coffee mug

You can’t make the day longer, and you can’t save an unused hour and spend it tomorrow. Every planner and productivity app on earth promises otherwise, but here’s the truth: time laughs at even the prettiest color-coded calendar.

So, if time isn’t the thing we can manage, what is? It’s our activities. It’s what we actually do inside the moments we’re handed. That’s the whole game. We were just spending the small gaps of our time on autopilot.

What sixty seconds really feels like

I was told about a prominent speaker who walked to center stage, opened his mouth, and stopped. No words. Just silence. He stood there and said nothing for a full minute.

You could feel the room tighten. Chairs creaked. Someone cleared their throat. People were nudging each other asking, “Is the mic broken?” “Is this guy okay?” It felt endless, but it was just sixty seconds.

Then the speaker grinned and said, “Well folks, that’s one minute. Now picture what you could build with it instead of waiting for it to pass.” I’ve never forgotten that story. He’d just shown a whole room how long a minute actually is, which is wild, because most of us hand ours away to our screens and never notice them go.

Where the diamonds hide (I walk past them all day)

Spare moments don’t wave a flag. They’re quiet little gaps, and once you start hunting them, they turn up everywhere:

The waiting room. Ten minutes before they call your name, usually spent flipping through a magazine from three years ago.

The pickup line or the parked car. Fifteen minutes with the engine running, almost always handed straight to a feed.

The tea kettle or the coffee maker. Four minutes of staring at it during brewing, silently willing it to hurry.

The “quick phone check” black hole. You sit down to wait for one thing and come up for air 20 minutes later, somehow an expert on a random celebrity’s breakup.

None of these time blocks are big. That’s exactly why we burn them. We’ve talked ourselves into believing progress needs the planets to align on a clear afternoon. It doesn’t. It needs five minutes and one decision.

The five-minute move I want you to steal

Here’s the practice I keep coming back to. When a spare moment opens up, before your hand drifts to your phone out of habit, ask one question:

“What’s one thing I could do in five minutes that would actually move the needle on something important?”

Not the whole list. One thing. Five minutes. Then do it. Just look at what we can actually knock out in that small window of time:

Send the email we’ve been writing in our heads all week.

Make the call we keep dodging (it’s ninety seconds, I promise).

Book the appointment. Reserve the table. Claim the domain.

Run the quick search that unsticks the next step.

Pick the color, lock the date, give a yes or no to the thing sitting in the inbox.

Scribble the idea down before it drifts off for good.

Each action alone is tiny, but each action is also usually the exact pebble that’s been blocking the next ten steps. A five-minute move feels like nothing in the moment. It feels enormous three weeks later when you notice how much progress you actually made.

Let’s respect the baby steps

We love to roll our eyes at small steps. They seem too insignificant to count. But a moment here and a moment there pile up shockingly fast. Five minutes a day is more than thirty hours a year pointed at one goal. Thirty hours you swore weren’t there.

Here’s the line I keep repeating to myself: “Slow progress toward something that matters beats no progress, every single time.” Nobody’s asking you or me to race, I only want us to stop kicking the diamonds into the gutter.

Let’s actually try it

Spot those moments of time that show up. For one day, just notice them. The line, the wait, the moments your coffee is brewing. Name each one as it shows up.

Then keep a short list handy. Jot down three to five five-minute moves that would help a goal you care about. Now you’re never caught empty-handed.

When you find yourself with two minutes, grab one item from the list and do it. When the next gap opens, reach for the list instead of the phone.

Let those action steps stack up. Don’t judge a single moment. Look at your pile after two weeks, because that’s when it starts getting good.

You’ll see I am right, you were never really out of time. You just had rough, uncut diamonds you weren’t aware were priceless treasures. Thirty hours a year gained, no longer lost, from moments you were about to throw away.

Curious where your time actually goes?

Sometimes the thing quietly eating our days stays invisible until someone helps us see it. If you’d like fresh eyes on where your spare moments are slipping off to, and what they could be building instead, I’d love to sit down with you. My free discovery session https://soulstepstlc.com/work-with-me/ is exactly that: no pressure, no pitch, no homework. Just an honest conversation about where you want to go and the small steps to get you there. Come as you are, busy calendar and all.