The key to life, posits Will Freeman, indolent anti-hero of Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, “is to think of a day as units of time, each unit consisting of no more than 30 minutes”.
Full hours are intimidating, his theory goes, and most activities need to take just half that an idea increasingly being adopted by high-powered CEOs and TV networks alike. “Compressed time”, they purport, is a means of crunching the likes of gym classes and screen dramas into a mere 30 minutes; something that allows even the most time-pressed among us to engage in activities they might have otherwise eschewed for taking too long. Here are just some of the things you could achieve in a “power half-hour”...
The Daily Telegraph
A DOSE OF CULTURE
"It's genius; the half-hour drama is the new black," says Julia Roberts of her Amazon Prime thriller, Homecoming one of several big new TV series airing this autumn comprised of "snackable" 30-minute episodes.
That a format traditionally reserved for comedies and kids’ shows is now being employed for serious dramas suggests that writers are getting better at pacing, or attention spans are waning. Either way, the half-hour window is also being embraced by high art: in London the Tate’s “30 Minutes On” free lunchtime tours feature artists, artworks and themes from the museum’s collection, which have often been historically ignored, forgotten or censored. Meanwhile, a study by the Yale University School of Public Health suggests those who read for 30 minutes a day live 23 months longer than those who don’t pick up a book at all.
AN UBER-EFFICIENT WORKOUT
If high-intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts first ushered in shorter class times, the trend has now truly taken off, with “express” classes springing up for those who want to do everything, exercise included, as efficiently as possible.
Les Mills offers a range of 30-minute workouts, including its renowned calorie-burn-maximising Grit class. This loved and loathed HIIT workout “builds cardiovascular fitness while improving strength and maximising calorie burn”. It’s the workout of choice for inner-city corporate types looking to leverage their lunch hour.
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Margaret Thatcher famously survived on just four hours’ sleep a night, but government files released this summer suggest she may have made up for it by catnapping in the back of her car (officials became so concerned she could suffer an injury if the Daimler was forced to brake while she was nodding off, that they arranged for a custom-built headrest to be fitted to protect her neck).
Napping gets a bad rep, not least at work, so Nick Littlehales, the elite sport coach who taught Cristiano Ronaldo how to kip while at Manchester United, has rebranded it a CRP (controlled recovery period) “the most powerful 30 minutes anybody could ever wish to introduce into their day”. For those who think they can’t achieve a short-term snooze, don’t fret you don’t even need to sleep, just tap into the state of semi-consciousness where your mind wanders. If anyone asks why your head’s on your desk, point them to the Nasa study that found a 26-minute nap can improve performance by 34 per cent, and alertness by more than half.
A HIGH-POWERED MEETING
Peter Bregman, CEO of global management consultancy Bregman Partners, deems the “magic” of 30-minute meetings his “single most life-changing, business-transforming revelation”, crediting them with focusing minds, cutting waffle and getting decisions made quickly.
Meanwhile: “I recommended the Pomodoro technique to two clients I worked with yesterday,” says productivity coach Clare Evans, of the time-management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 80s, which breaks tasks into 25-minute intervals separated by five-minute breaks. “There is research that shows our brains really only focus for a relatively short time, around 15-20 minutes anyway, and factoring in time to do nothing is just as important for creativity as being super-productive,” says Evans, who divides her own week into half-hour chunks, a la Freeman. “I build in breaks, and clear emails in one half-hour chunk, make phone calls in another half-hour chunk, etc. It gives you a much better picture of what your day actually looks like.”
