Ten minutes at a time

A wall that will stand for hundreds of years was built stone by stone, blah blah blah. (Image by Tim Hill)

The very hardest, most meaningful tasks don’t always make it onto our to-do lists.

Because you can’t really do a project — you can only do a task related to that project — we might struggle to start the projects that are important to us. Day after day, what we dream of doing remains undone in favor of the urgent and easily knowable.

We can easily justify such behavior. Our lives are busy. Whatever else we may have wanted to do, the time fills up. How, exactly, were we going to get around to the project that no one is asking for?

The answer is that we'll do it in ten minutes at a time. And then again, and then again.

In the early stages, those ten minutes might be spent trying to identify even one action that we could take related to a project. This might include research and scouting — for instance, sending a message to a friend to ask a question or looking for courses to take to develop our skills and knowledge. As these actions are identified, they can be placed on our to-do list for a future work session of ten minutes or less.

We get stuck on a project in two ways: We don't know what we're supposed to do, or we resist doing what we're supposed to do. These small increments of time solve both problems. We can dedicate a bit of time to figuring out what we're supposed to do — this counts as working on the project, of course. Or, once we know what we're supposed to do, we can do just a little bit of it, which is less heavy than doing a lot of it.

Some of us resist the idea that anything meaningful can be done in ten minutes at a time. But the math speaks for itself. Ten minutes a day, six days a week, is an hour. With 52 weeks in a year, that's 52 hours spent on our project, or the equivalent of more than a week of full effort.

What's more, there's a bit of a trick baked into this plan that takes advantage of human nature. Once we build a little momentum, we'll probably want to spend more than just ten minutes a day on tasks related to our project. When we know what to do next, it's easier to want to do it, which creates a virtuous cycle in which we always know what's coming next and find ourselves eagerly anticipating it instead of dreading it. What begins in ten minutes at a time might eventually turn into hours on end of dedicated focus.

It's kind of depressing to think about what we've missed out on — the investment we could have made long ago and what it could have become. But since we can't do anything about that, we might as well look ahead and imagine where we'd like to be years from now. What will we be glad then that we did now?

Five years of ten minutes at a time is 260 hours, which is significant in itself. However, that's not the whole story. The truth is that our commitment compounds. Skills, relationships, habits, reputation — there's the chance that these things will not just grow over time, but multiply through momentum, network effects, and increased efficiency. The ten minutes we spend today could yield more benefit than we can even imagine at this moment.

As James Mercer once sang, "The years have been short, but the days were long." No matter how busy and overwhelmed we are, we can squeeze in ten minutes of effort on a project that matters to us. Otherwise, as we may know from bitter experience, a decade can fly by before we've taken the first step.

Little by little, we'll make progress. Ten minutes is a small amount of time, but it's not nothing. It goes into the bank and never gets taken out again. Before we know it, our consistent investment will deliver returns we can be proud of.

What will you do with ten minutes today?