"All of my dreams, from the sky, drop like confetti." ~ Little Mix

Time confetti is little, shredded fragments of time. I first heard Laurie Santos mention it on the Ten Percent Happier podcast with Dan Harris. Santos credits the term to Ashley Whillans, and Whillans credits the term to Brigid Schulte.

In the podcast, Santos talked about the fragments in a positive light - unexpected gifts of time like a meeting ending early, waiting for a friend to join you for lunch, finishing a project early. Her challenge to listeners was are we using this time confetti to enhance our happiness significantly - meditating or texting a friend versus playing Candy Crush or scrolling through Twitter.

In Time Smart, Whillans talks about time confetti more as a negative, "little bits of seconds and minutes lost to unproductive multitasking." The example she gives is an hour of leisure being interrupted with emails, text, Twitter, and Slack notifications. It's a positive block of time shredded into smaller pieces.

I'm planning to use the term to refer to the tiny gifts as Santos suggests. I'm working to savor those moments of time confetti when they present themselves and use them more effectively. I'm also going to embrace Whillans framing of shredding productive time. How can I better prevent shredding from those bigger blocks of time where I can do deep work?

Two great challenges to refine my use of time.