The Power of 10 Minutes is underestimated by most business people. Create hours of quality time from well used bursts of 10 minutes.
Everyone is busy these days so I won’t tell you about having 5 children under 6, writing a book and running a transformational IT programme at a bank all at the same time. What I can tell you about is how you can put short bursts of efficient activity to good use. Numerous batches of 10 minutes add up to quality hours if they are connected with a golden thread of getting and staying organised.
Malcolm Gladwell says you need to spend 10,000 hours doing something to be an expert. Writing a book or a thesis can also take thousands of hours – the fact is unless it’s your day job most of those hours will be spent discontinuously. Snatch a couple hours after the kids have gone to bed, grab your iPad over lunch, open your laptop on the train or wake up early and put an hour in before sunrise.
Unleash Your Power of 10 Minutes
But how well do you use these sanctuaries of time-space? Searching through your inbox for that one email you need before you can start the task = 5 minutes wasted. Looking for that one piece of paper underneath everything else on your desk = 3 minutes. Trying to remember your thoughts you left in mid-air last time so you can construct the rest of the paragraph = 4 minutes.
Why not take some time out to sort your inbox, file the papers on your desk or start a notebook for your writing project. Getting organised also takes time but you’ll be investing in future batches of even more efficient 10 minutes. If you can literally pick up where you left off then the start up time for a task doesn’t erode the valuable work time you need to make actual progress.
As for my book? It was 4 years of quickly snatched, inefficiently used 10 minutes here and there; sometimes more, usually less. Golden thread? Great idea. Notebook? I’ll try that next time. Leaving thoughts in fully constructed sentences or paragraphs before finishing each time? Brilliant concept… I didn’t say I got it right, only that I learned it the hard way.
