One day this summer, my 3-y-o niece was over at our house with most of her older siblings. We were all on the floor building or playing with lego and she started singing, okay, it was more like belting out, “Never overlook a little engine!” She sang that line over and over and over.

And that made me think.

No, not about little engines. About little numbers.

It’s so easy to overlook and discount the importance of little numbers. We simply ignore them, don’t think they matter, and overlook them as we focus on the bigger things! But . . . let’s take another look at those little numbers. What good are they?

If you have 10 minutes here, 7 minutes there, and 13 minutes later, you have a full 30 minutes to do things.

If you write 25 words now, 48 words later, 123 words in a little while, and 96 words before the end of the day, that’s 292 words! And then you would just need 8 more words to reach 300.

But maybe you have a book you need to read. A page here, 10 minutes there, another page while waiting for something to load on your computer, five minutes there. You are a lot farther along than if you had waited for a large block of time. Yes, larger blocks of time are wonderful, but there are little minutes that come our way.

What do we do with them?

• Spend ten minutes writing.
• Read for those five minutes of waiting.
• Sit down and write 50 words. (It might turn into 75!)
• Take three minutes and see how many things you can get taken care of.
• Sprint for fifteen minutes as you tackle that thing you keep putting off. (It might only take you five minutes, so you can write, read, or get something else done!)

We have time. We often say we don’t though. The question is, what do we do with that time?

• 5 minutes on Facebook
• 10 minutes on Instagram
• 12 minutes on Pinterest
• 37 minutes on Goodreads
• 19 minutes being silly online
• 22 minutes wandering the internet in the name of “research”
• = 1 hour and 45 minutes. How much could you have gotten written, or how much read, or how much accomplished in that amount of time?

Never overlook the little numbers.

Are you guilty of overlooking the little numbers? I am. What can you do today to not overlook them? How many extra minutes can you find that can be used for production instead of wasting it?