Begin timer.
You can do more than you think in ten minutes.
- Exercise (When I don’t have much time, or need to get my heart pumping, I go back to the NY Times 7 Minute Workout)
- Read a few pages of a book
- Or write a blog post
I recently listened to a podcast about The Complete History & Strategy of IKEA and its founder Ingvar Kamprad.
He has a quote that really stuck with me.
“You can do so much in 10 minutes. Ten minutes once gone are gone for good. You can never get them back. Ten minutes are not just a sixth of your hourly pay. Ten minutes are a piece of yourself. Divide your life into 10 minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.”
We’re at three minutes now…
Devoting small snippets of time to coding up a blog and writing articles has been key to actually getting this thing live (I’ve thought about doing it for years).
One trick is to break tasks down into ten-minute tasks. Here’s a timely example:
I knew I would take forever picking the tech stack and hand-crafting the code for this blog. Instead, I came across an Astro template that I fell in love with.
Ten minutes after running the setup commands, I had a working blog. Momentum starts to build.
Now we’re at six minutes…
I have mixed feelings about AI, especially in writing (it just feels off and insincere). But it really speeds up grammatical editing or providing inspiration to rephrase a tricky sentence.
Queue up the AI edits.
In a short amount of time, I have another blog post written.
Now we’re at fifteen minutes… 🤣
Footnotes:
Thats the real magic of ten minutes, you usually end up going a little longer than you think.