
Ten minutes a day - alexallain
https://medium.com/@alexallain/ten-minutes-a-day-e2fa1084f924
======
abainbridge
So if I time-slice the 8 productive hours of my day into 10 minute slots, can
I write 48 books in 499 days?

Of course not.

I've tried working on pet projects for 10 minutes before going to work each
day. The problem I find is that while I might only do active work on the task
for ten minutes, my brain is thinking about it for much longer.

Spending those ten minutes in the morning reduces my ability to do my day job
because I've used up a significant fraction of my day's useful thinking
budget. I find I can only sustain these pet projects when my day job is in a
boring/easy phase. (This might have something to do with getting older - I'm
42, or it might be because my job isn't boring/easy much these days).

~~~
m3kw9
No, if you read what he wrote, he said during the time he isn’t writing he
would be constantly working and think about it in his mind. So practically, he
works on it like a few hours a day. The writing just takes ten minutes, the
design takes the rest.

~~~
drdeadringer
So, something like: "Think really hard, then execute really quick."

~~~
alexallain
I wouldn't say that it felt like I was thinking really hard in times I wasn't
writing. It's a bit like the technique of putting down a crossword for a
little while when you get stuck - you might not be thinking much about the
puzzle, but somehow you're turning it over in your head.

FWIW, I do agree with the original comment at the top of this thread that this
technique couldn't yield 48 books in 2 years - there's only so much headspace
available, and this technique is one that taps into that headspace effectively
for long-term projects, but it's not magic.

------
SingAlong
I have a 10min attention span for intense activities like reading. I use this
to my advantage to do I might otherwise not do.

* Reading: I take my Kindle to the toilet.

* Solve quiz on Brilliant.org during office commute

* Listen to audiobooks before sleep

* When waiting for the next meeting, I read bookmarked articles.

\--- My Lessons: \---

* It is very important to stop doing something once I realize I have no more juice.

* My total learning time per day is around 1hr on best days.

* Takes 1hr to reach office. So during cab rides, after a quiz is done (10-15min), I nap.

* When zoned out in and realize I'm doing random wild-wild-internet-reading, I immediately turn tech off. I just talk to people (work or casual chat).

* During times of silence, I observe things around me. I learn new things about stuff that has been around me for a long time. I put these observations to use when I draw (I use Procreate app on iPad). For example: I observed reflections in water and attempted to draw a reflection [https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxmF1enz87/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxmF1enz87/)

------
tapanjk
> Writing every day kept ideas top of mind. When I finished writing, I’d carry
> the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I’d talk to people about them.
> My ideas were always nearby, making it easy to jump back in.

This sounds like the main takeaway. Even though the direct time spent on an
activity may seem small, the total effective time spent on that activity
shoots up if it is performed daily (v/s weekly or longer).

~~~
sowbug
I also liked this: "... today might not be a good day, so let’s use it for
something I have to do anyway."

The idea transfers well to coding. Maybe you're not feeling inspired today,
but there's probably something mechanical that needs to happen to your project
-- resolve a TODO, update the docs, triage a bug report. So do it, and even if
that doesn't snap you back into the groove, at least you got that one thing
done.

~~~
teddyh
“You have to move forward a little bit, every day. It doesn’t matter if your
code is lame and buggy and nobody wants it. If you are moving forward, writing
code and fixing bugs constantly, time is on your side.”

— Joel Spolsky, _Fire And Motion_ ,
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-
motion/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/)

~~~
vincengomes
"If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then
crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward"

\- MLK

------
melenaos
Recently I have start workout for 10 mins a day including warmup.

To go for an hour in the gym it's much harder because it take +30 mins to
commute +15 min to shower. After 1 hour of gym I feel exhausted and I don't
want to do it again next day.

But with 10 mins per day, I don't have to convince myself to do it, it's such
an easy task and I feel better after doing it. I don't lose my time in commute
and I do it every day which is much better than 3 times per week.

Most days I do 10 mins of meditation and with that I have two great habits
that takes most 30 min from my time.

~~~
ndnxhs
I have found cycling to be a good daily exercise. It becomes my commute so it
takes no time out of my day also there is no way to give up. I can stop at any
time at a gym but if I stop on my bike I still have to get back home.

I have a pretty brutal uphill way back home but I feel great after which makes
me do it again the next day.

~~~
temo4ka
Yep, it's great unless the uphill is actually on the way to the job, then it
becomes not so great :-)

~~~
ndnxhs
In that case I'd use an ebike. Still decent fitness but not super intence

------
Adamantcheese
Writing for 10 minutes a day is great and all, but if you're not the type of
person that can easily switch tasks and be immediately ready to perform then
it's not going to work out for you. Similarly, if you get stuck on a task and
just want to keep going until you're done, you're going to have a hard time
stopping. When I was doing NaNoWriMo I generally tried to go for the estimate
of ~1337 words a day, but some days I had good ideas and kept going. Other
days I didn't and spent a lot of time thinking about where to take the story
and didn't write a lot. I don't believe at any time I spent less than 30
minutes working. And even then, it was always on my mind. Different people
have different abilities, I don't believe that this is generally applicable
and different people may have different minima/maxima for how much time they
take to start up a task.

~~~
cheerlessbog
Conversely Hemingway recommended to stop when the writing was going well:

> The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know
> what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel
> you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so
> try to remember it.

~~~
p1esk
This is a great advice!

------
beatgammit
I like the pomodoro technique [1], which breaks tasks up into 25 minute work
chunks with 5 minutes break between parts. I find I'm able to get more work
done because I'm focused on one task.

10 minutes seems like not enough time to really get meaningful work done since
it often takes me a few minutes to get back into whatever it is.

I think 10 minutes just isn't quite enough time, so I think I'll just include
it as a pomodoro internal. I like the idea of forcing myself to do something
everyday, so perhaps I'll schedule two small tasks for the internal, and if
I'm making really good progress on one, I'll reschedule the other task.

But I definitely like the main idea here, since I often let things languish
because I'm worried about them taking too long.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique)

~~~
wuunderbar
What if what you're working on is going to take longer than 25 minutes, and
then taking that 5 minute break breaks up your mental flow?

That is, after returning after 5 minutes it takes a couple minutes to re-
orient yourself to the problem at hand?

~~~
Tempest1981
For me, Pomodoro is a technique to help you get started, and to focus. Vs
procrastinate all day.

For the case you mention, I would adapt the technique to whatever benefits you
the most. If you're in the flow, defer the break. If you defer too much, and
start feeling burned out, adjust.

For some people, 25 minutes is too long. Find what works for you.

------
nefitty
The post concisely explains the power of taking small steps in terms of
productive work and projects. One thing I do is the pomodoro technique every
day. I track and graph the amount of pomodoros I do, so ostensibly I could go
back later and measure how many pomodoros it took me to complete some specific
project.

The author has sewn together the concepts of non-zero days, the Seinfeld
method plus a tweak to the pomodoro technique and then measured his progress.
This could work for anyone, it's a good combination, simple to implement and
with a little patience almost certainly leads to powerful results over time.

------
klyrs
Some of this reminds me of how I wrote my thesis. I lived in a duplex, and my
neighbors moved out. I'd been sharing their internet, so that went away with
them. My spouse was supportive of my decision to not get our own internet
connection until my thesis was out the door.

I uninstalled all of the games from my computer, except one. I embarked on a
weird quest in the online game I was playing; which was accomplished by
running a daily script on a cron job and effectively shut me out of the game.
The game I left on my computer was XCOM: Terror from the Deep -- which I was
playing on the hardest mode.

That XCOM game is frikkin impossible. So I hacked the save games, extracting
them into spreadsheets. My spouse would ask, "Are you playing the spreadsheet
game again?" So that wasn't very engaging for long. I'd get bored and go back
to work on my thesis.

All that was a success, in the end. When the content was finished, I spent
about a week on minor tweaks. I got sick of that, and turned my thesis in two
weeks before the deadline. And to be honest... once we got internet hooked up,
all my bad habits came flooding back. _sigh_

------
LawnboyMax
I find it relatively easy to stick to doing productive things every single day
if I do them the first thing in the morning, before I have breakfast. Later in
the day things always get in a way and it is much harder to concentrate on non
urgent things.

------
maheart
I started using the Pomodoro technique a few years ago, and I've successfully
shipped 3 (almost 4) FOSS projects since then. The hardest part is getting
started. It's surprising how much work gets done with only 30 minutes a day,
over a few months.

On an unrelated note, like the author, I also keep track of how much time I've
spent on these FOSS projectss. But it's disheartening to see how much time
I've spent on FOSS, and while I have users (they want support/features :) --
potential employers spend almost no time looking at my work, but will still
ask me to spend hours on their tech challenges (averaging ~20 hours per
challenge).

~~~
mindentropy
> The hardest part is getting started.

This is a big problem for me as I age. Personal problems etc take up my mind
space and it is very hard to motivate myself to work. Also constant
interruptions which I have to attend to makes things really miserable and have
stopped my progress of personal projects.

What do you do to handle starting up?

------
ocdtrekkie
As a hobbyist coder, I've tended to have a lot of success doing the same with
coding. I try to have a contribution on GitHub every day. Doesn't have to be a
big new feature, maybe I fixed something, maybe I edited some comments
somewhere. But I'm _touching_ my various projects frequently, which by that
nature, tends to keep me on a track of progress.

When I fall off of the routine, sometimes I have a gap in working on my code
for months.

------
a-saleh
I never got into a place the 10 minutes a day would really help me accomplish
anything. I do know it is possible, one day I would like to replicate
something like [1], splitting a work-weeks worth of work into several months
of pomodoro a day.

It kinda worked when I was attempting to write a blog, but even then I never
really figured out how to make the routine stick and often it took me half of
the designated time to even start writing.

This time-to-start was even worse when programming.

Well, one day!

[1] [https://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-
kata/](https://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/)

~~~
kungtotte
I try to take inspiration from this article: [https://fs.blog/2018/06/succeed-
at-work/](https://fs.blog/2018/06/succeed-at-work/)

I think a 15-minute resolution is more reasonable than a 10-minute resolution.
If you assume that you allocate each block to a unique activity that means
doing six different things per hour instead of doing only four things in the
same timeframe.

There's nothing stopping you from using four blocks in a row for an activity,
or two, or three, but the minimum amount of time to spend on something is 15
minutes which I think is more worthwhile than 10 minutes.

The only downside is it doesn't let you do two pomodoro blocks per hour, if
that's something you want to incorporate into your routine.

------
Tempest1981
The email trick seems like a great way to avoid procrastinating, and get
started:

> The other thing that really helped is that I didn’t allow myself to check my
> email until I worked on the book.

------
nevster
I use [http://dontbreakthechain.com](http://dontbreakthechain.com) and have a
few different 10 minute things in there.

~~~
Waterluvian
I'd love to hear from full time parents how they do routines like these.

I'm sure it's absolutely possible but between a 2 month and 2 year old I don't
come close to finding the time to think about extra projects.

~~~
wj
Short answer is that, like everything in life, it is harder as a parent.

I've meditated for ten minutes a day for a few months now and written 500
words a day so far this year. The chain method absolutely works (I'll stay up
late at night staring at a blank page until I get to my 500 words) but it can
be a chore. I go through with it because I know that once I break the chain
that makes it easier to break it tomorrow.

I'm hoping that my current work craziness calms down a bit in a few weeks at
which point I'll be scheduling these two things on my calendar in the morning
and not start the rest of my day until they are done.

------
jungletime
Just curious, if I wanted to setup several working environments and make it as
quick as possible to switch between them (programming vs video editing vs
photo editing). How would I go about doing that on a Mac to be as quick as
possible. Several different programs would need to be open and closed
automatically.

~~~
corny
I have a several ".command" files organized in a stack in my dock. Each one of
them is a bash script that opens all the files I need for a project. When I'm
done, I manually close everything.

------
pacomerh
I think my problem with the 10 minutes day is that maybe my ideas wont come
until minute 9 and now I'll need to put them down, which will take me another
15 min. This probably works for things that don't require imagination, like
exercise or labor work.

~~~
dchest
Surely, 10 min is a lower bound. If it takes more time, I guess, it's even
better.

------
roryisok
> When I finished writing, I’d carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower,
> and I’d talk to people about them

I do find myself shower-coding most days, but I never talk to people about it.
There's never anyone else in the shower.

~~~
beatgammit
Get a rubber ducky. It's not a person, but then again, I meet very few people
who know enough about what I'm working on that they're helpful in giving
advice, so they might as well be a rubber ducky.

