So if I time-slice the 8 productive hours of my day into 10 minute slots, can I write 48 books in 499 days?<p>Of course not.<p>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.<p>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).
I have a 10min attention span for intense activities like reading. I use this to my advantage to do I might otherwise not do.<p>* Reading: I take my Kindle to the toilet.<p>* Solve quiz on Brilliant.org during office commute<p>* Listen to audiobooks before sleep<p>* When waiting for the next meeting, I read bookmarked articles.<p>---
My Lessons:
---<p>* It is very important to stop doing something once I realize I have no more juice.<p>* My total learning time per day is around 1hr on best days.<p>* Takes 1hr to reach office. So during cab rides, after a quiz is done (10-15min), I nap.<p>* 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).<p>* 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 <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxmF1enz87/" rel="nofollow">https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxmF1enz87/</a>
> 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.<p>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).
Recently I have start workout for 10 mins a day including warmup.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Most days I do 10 mins of meditation and with that I have two great habits that takes most 30 min from my time.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>But I definitely like the main idea here, since I often let things languish because I'm worried about them taking too long.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique</a>
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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. <i>sigh</i>
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.
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.<p>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).
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 <i>touching</i> my various projects frequently, which by that nature, tends to keep me on a track of progress.<p>When I fall off of the routine, sometimes I have a gap in working on my code for months.
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.<p>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.<p>This time-to-start was even worse when programming.<p>Well, one day!<p>[1] <a href="https://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/" rel="nofollow">https://mikekchar.github.io/core-wars-kata/</a>
The email trick seems like a great way to avoid procrastinating, and get started:<p>> The other thing that really helped is that I didn’t allow myself to check my email until I worked on the book.
I use <a href="http://dontbreakthechain.com" rel="nofollow">http://dontbreakthechain.com</a> and have a few different 10 minute things in there.
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.
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.
> When I finished writing, I’d carry the puzzles to my commute or the shower, and I’d talk to people about them<p>I do find myself shower-coding most days, but I never talk to people about it. There's never anyone else in the shower.