10 Minutes has gotten a bad rap. While it may seem like an insignificant amount of time, 10 minutes can be very useful in productivity. Although there aren’t many projects that can get done in 10 minutes, you sure can get one started.
As a matter of fact, I think that 10 minutes is way better than, say, 55. Any procrastinator worth his/her salt knows that your mind will take as long has been allotted to finish a task. If you’ve got 55 minutes to finish something, well by George it’s gonna take at least that long. Odds are you’ll slack off for 40 minutes and take the remaining 15 doing a shoddy job on whatever it is you’re working on.
Oh, but 10 minutes… now that’s a tasty number. Not only will ten get you started, you’ll probably be finished too, if you focus. And focus is practically required with 10 minutes. It’s a small, focused amount of time.
And if you’ve got five blocks of 10 minutes lying around in your day, that’s 50 minutes of highly-focused time. Compare that to a larger chunk of 50 minutes. That’s right, more time for procrastination. Small, focused, manageable bursts of productivity are much more effective than those flabby blocks of time.
I’ve found that breaking apart my day into 10 minutes blocks of time has been useful. When those 10 minutes are up I take a quick break, move on to the next task or re-evaluate what still needs to be done on the current task. This constant re-evaluation really keeps my mind from wandering off to other, less-important things, keeping my purpose razor sharp.
Do you guys use this method? I’m sure we’ve got some opinions out there either for or against it. I’d love to hear them…