The ten-minute timer trick

For the work you avoid the most

Jun 24, 2024

Transcript

This is The Nooner, a (very short) daily newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.

To see the first post, which doubles as an explainer, click here.

Also a quick reminder that you can listen to the podcast version of each post wherever you listen to podcasts.

The ten-minute timer trick

Stuff on my to-do list usually comes in three sizes:

Two minute tasks, which I can knock off right away.
Tasks or projects that will take less than an hour, which I’ll often plug into my calendar.
Longer or ongoing projects that will take much, much more than an hour, which I put off until they get all gummed up with the sticky mold of resistance. We’re talking here about things like writing a novel, or doing your taxes.

The problem is that there’s a part of my brain that reflexively panics at the thought of facing something so large and complex. And then, in order to protect itself from this terrifying thing, it triggers a hundred other ideas and desires to distract me from any intention I might have had to get started.

Here’s a trick that’s been working for me lately:

Decide on an arbitrarily short, non-overwhelming amount of time. Say...ten minutes. Or five.
Set a timer for exactly that amount of time.
Work on the thing I’ve been avoiding.

As soon as the timer goes off, I’m allowed to keep working on the thing, if I feel like it, and if I have time.

But -- and this is very important -- I’m also allowed to stop.

The reason this works is because it dramatically reduces the size of the problem from the perspective of that irrational, panicky part of my brain. So instead of sounding the alarm and marshaling a host of distractions, it just says, “Oh, ten minutes? That’s not so bad. Alright then.”

Let me emphasize that I did not invent this trick. I just remembered it recently and started to use it again, because I noticed that I kept sabotaging the efforts I was making to get to work on certain things.

So if you find yourself in a similar situation, just ask yourself -- or, more specifically, the part of your brain that fills with dread every time you think about that certain project you’ve been avoiding -- what’s a very small number of minutes you actually would be willing to work on it?

Then set a timer, which signals that you’re serious about the boundary, and get started.

You might be surprised to discover that after doing this a handful of times, all the resistance around the project has dried up and blown away.