DISQUS

Bob Younce at the Writing Jour · 1 year ago

How true this is. When I've got a client job I don't particularly enjoy (like writing a dozen articles on medical billing procedures, UGH!) I do it 15 minutes at a time.

I learned that from flylady, too, by way of my wife (angiespangies.com) who is a big advocate of the flylady system. She's even gone to local flylady conventions!

Good form!

Lisa Young · 1 year ago

I find that a timer works great for a LOT of things. Email, phone calls, etc. It keeps me from getting distracted, and I stay on task MUCH more easily.

I HATE doing dishes. I set the microwave timer for 15 minutes and that's usually enough time to do one load. Then, I'm out of the kitchen and can move onto more exciting things.

For phone calls, I have a wind up an egg timer, and if it's a good conversation, I can ignore my timer when it goes off. If it's not so interesting (or it's taking too much of my day), I just say "that's my timer! I have to go take care of something, I'll have to let you go now!" and I'm off the phone in a snap!

15 minutes is how I build all my projects. I, too, found the fly lady a couple of years ago, and while I may have fallen away from her subscriber list, the words of wisdom ring true: ANYONE can do ANYTHING for 15 minutes.

-Lisa

isabella mori · 1 year ago

funny - as soon as i saw your headline i thought: flylady!

timers are absolutely awesome.

here's something that i do and recommend to clients: when it gets real tough, get a friend to help. call a friend, say, "i need to work on X for 15 (20, 30, 5 - whatever) minutes, i just need to tell someone about it. i'll start right now - can i call you back when i'm done?"

i have some friends with whom i do this regularly but sometimes i call someone up out of the blue and they're almost always delighted and come up with something of their own.

thanks for a great post!

oh, and lisa, i love the idea of using a timer for conversations!

Lynette Chandler · 1 year ago

How interesting the mention about Fly Lady. Though I know who she is, I've never visited her site. But anyway, this is something I do daily and I learned it from Printable CEO. Using the Emergent Task Timer which is really blocks of 15 minutes to help track billable time and also it is great to motivate you to just get stuff done. Every time my timer dings it's like Awww! I haven't even finished it yet and almost always move on.

At the end of the day I really like looking back at the sheet and seeing all those 15 minute bubbles filled out. It's a really good visual reminder how much I've actually done that day. Which is fab for days you don't feel like you've made much of a dent but you know you've done a lot.

isabella mori · 1 year ago

this is funny - i thought i'd visit your blog, look around a bit and then saw this post: oh, how interesting, this is something i'll comment on! and then i saw that i had done that already :)

now we could say i'm getting senile. or we could say that you wrote a post that REALLY speaks to me :)

CoachNancyP · 7 months ago

It was kind of funny for me to see this post come accross Twitter as I also recently sent a post on it, and have even worked together with parents on Twitter with, "On your mark, get set, go..." and "Let's go take 15 minutes to get something done together."

I also give credit to Flylady. She is awesome, and has a gentle, consistent way of motivating others.

It's good to see the message out there from others too. It really is an effective way to get things done.

ElizabethPW · 7 months ago

Nancy -

This is such a powerful & universal principle, I'm not surprised that you were also writing about it too today! (and, it's something I need to hear over and over again myself, whenever I get stuck in procrastination mode)

~ Elizabeth