Turn off your email and cell for a couple hours each day—and watch what happens.

Time is your most valuable possession. Every day 86,400 seconds are deposited in your own personal time account. You can spend this time any way you want to—you can squander it or use it for good—but you can’t save it. Time can’t really be saved, it can only be spent. And how you spend your days is how you spend your life.

So, how will you spend today? Social scientists say that the average person can redeem 2-6 hours of pure creative time each day by simply eliminating their top time-wasters. Everyone has his/her own list of time-wasters, but three of the most heinous are:

• constantly checking e-mails and Facebook
• wandering the internet
• spontaneous texting

A great way to become vastly more creative and productive is to simply go offline for a block of time each day. It’s simple. Just shut down your email and cellphone for 2-6 hours every day—or at least while you’re creating. The sky won’t fall in while you’re off the grid, but your personal focus and creativity will soar.

Consider what you could dream, imagine or accomplish with 2-6 extra hours of pure uninterrupted creativity each day. Joseph Heller wrote his first best-seller—Catch-22—by writing for just two hours every morning before going to his day job as a waiter. Isaac Asimov wrote more than 400 books by setting aside just six uninterrupted hours each day.

If you decide to go offline for, say, three hours per day, that’s 66 additional hours of pure creativity each month for you alone. If your ten-person work group does it, that’s 660 additional hours. And if your 100-person company does it, that’s 6,600 additional hours of human creativity per month that your company can bring on line—without increasing your overhead by a single dollar. Try it.

Remember:

• Time is our most valuable possession.
• How we spend our time is how we spend our lives
• We don’t waste time, we waste ourselves