Being thoughtful and labeled as someone who thinks about others is yet another calculation. There are 24 hours in a day, you sleep on average 8 of them, you spend another 10-12 working, at school, or tending to necessities. That leaves 4-6 hours each day that you can customize to your liking. Those 4-6 precious hours are yours to spend however you wish and those who are more selfish spend a higher percentage of them thinking about themselves and their own endeavors. Let’s say the average person spends 5% of their time thinking about others in some meaningful way while a selfish person spends 1%. Let’s then average 4-6 hours to 5 and convert it to minutes = 300 minutes. At 5% that is 15 minutes per day that the average person goes out of their way to really think about another person’s well-being and ways they could help improve it. 1% would be 3 minutes. Someone who is “thoughtful” might adjust that percentage to 10% and spend 30 minutes per day thinking about others. The point is, we go about our days not reflecting on how we really spend our time, and even less on adjusting them to reach our goals. By consciously recognizing this fact, you have the power every day to change how you spend your free time. And this thought process applies to many different things, not just your level of selfishness. For awhile, I conducted an experiment using Toggl where I tracked every minute of my day for weeks. It revealed new insights about how I really spend my time and, as a result, who I really am. The second level after that, is the realization that small adjustments, tweaking your day just slightly, changes the long-term statistics of your behavior and the results. A 1% increase towards selflessness, over a long period of time, could result in all sorts of unexpected benefits from the extra 3 minutes per day, 21 minutes per week, or 18 hours per year. That’s the power of recognizing how numbers can influence your life.