Don’t have time? Here are 12 minutes you might have overlooked.

We all have the same 24 hours in the day. The difference is how you use each of those hours.

Your plane has landed, the seatbelt sign has been turned off. You are free to stand up. You have about 12 minutes before you can actually take a step. Here are the options on what you can do:

1. Stand,
2. Gather your carry-on,
3. Step in front of the other person across from you in the aisle,
4. Finish your peanuts,
5. Peer over others to see if anyone is moving,
6. Wait,
7. Fish through the seat pocket and find that you were about to leave your magazine,
8. Harumph,
9. Sigh,
10. Complain,
11. Text your pickup that you landed,
12. Read,
13. Listen to another few pages of your book,
14. Get in another part of the podcast on book marketing.

I did #14 this evening and it gave me a spledorific idea for the marketing of our kids books (I’ll post about it soon). Had I been doing options 1 through 13, I might have missed that moment, just skipped over the section, maybe never to be thought of again.

I don’t get why people all want to stand up in the aisle when the seatbelt sign goes off. You physically can’t go anywhere. It’s a mystery of psychology and physics to me.

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe, by staying in my seat and continuing to read my book (or play a card game with my son or finish what I was listening to) I’m missing out on something else that I don’t understand because I don’t do it. Maybe those people who deplane 22 seconds before I do get a free ice cream when they leave and I never know about it because they don’t give it to those people who stay behind and don’t stand up. I’m probably missing out big (BIG) time. I’ll never know.

If each of those 12 minutes were worth $10,000, would you remain seated with your seatbelt fastened?

If you say you don’t have enough time in your life, find a few minutes that you otherwise might overlook. Make a game out of it. Read an extra page. Play one more round of Gin Rummy. Listen to 12 more minutes of your podcast. It might trigger a creative spark about a marketing idea that’s going to mean the difference between 1 million in sales of the book and 2 million. So those 12 minutes might be worth $120,000. That’s $10,000 per minute.

A guy can dream, right? I can dream big. I can dream fun. Hey, I have an extra 12 minutes. I have loads of time.