The Ten Minute Rule and Momentum at the Office

“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.” – Muhammad Ali

At work, you ever get that feeing like you’ve been treading water? Just working your tail off but not really getting anywhere?

I have a sneaking suspicion most of you out there know the feeling – trying to keep up with the work load is tiring enough, let alone making time for ongoing education or personal growth in the forms of health/fitness, quality relationships, or whatever else keeps us sane. I find what causes this to happen isn’t a huge project or a tough assignment, but really the little nagging tasks that prevent us from focusing on the important issues at hand. Let me explain.

I’ve been slow to come around to it, but I have a revised opinion when it comes to momentum in the workday and I’d love to share my personal behavioral change and gather some feedback from the other monkeys out there as to my new system that has helped me break through a work plateau recently. It’s wildly simple and requires a little self-trickery, but it has been saving my you-know-what all summer long. I’m not the first person to suggest it, but if I can just help one person out there, I’ll have done my job.

It goes a little something like this: Anything that can be done in 10 minutes, jot it down on a post-it, and do it immediately you finish your current undertaking (unless you are in the middle of urgently time sensitive assignment. Which, let’s be honest, we tend to overstate…) I’ve sure you’ve heard of the ‘Two Minute Rule’ before, propounding a similar concept but with a tighter time frame.

I tried the Two Minute Rule for a while, but constantly found that I would, instead of doing X,Y, or Z, tell myself that it would take 5-10 minutes and thus it was dutifully written down on a post-it note and shoved with defiance onto my desk bulletin board. Some things just can’t be capped of nicely in two minutes. Throughout the day, I would rack up anywhere between half a dozen and a score of these ‘left on the shelf’ tasks. They ranged anywhere from: re-format slide 31 of this pitch book, revise investment memo opening paragraph to emphasize importance of secondary revenue streams, or even order birthday present for Dad. Then I would try to knock off all these things at the end of the day or during a lull in the work.

Common productivity wisdom claims you should ‘batch’ all of your small/menial tasks and do them together. I’m absolutely on board when it comes to e-mail! If you’re not careful, just ‘checking your inbox’ can be a time sink of a full hour.

But for these five-to-ten minute suckers, batching just doesn’t work as well for me. I find if I fill in the blanks of my day with these to-dos that are rather trivial, I not only get them all done, but I build momentum throughout the day. Plus, focusing hard on something for ten minutes is not too challenging! It actually feels good.

This is the point I want to harp on a bit, because recently I’ve been walking out the door feeling like the day was just as efficient as James Bond’s womanizing escapades. Cool and calculated.

The idea of momentum for me is a strong one, because it keeps the ball rolling. In the past, I’ve encountered blocks of non-productivity when I tell myself I’m going to work on these small little tasks I’ve put on my to-do list, but after one or two, I find that switching focus so rapidly from one to the other gets me off track. For me, it’s the moving from activity to activity that creates the inefficiency. And if multiple switches are put together in a short time, I’m hopeless.

So, to use a simile perhaps best understood by VPs and above due to prohibitively expensive restaurants in NYC except during restaurant week: instead of thinking of the workday like a banquet, in which you have big course after course and then gobble down ten little petit-fours for dessert, think of it like a tasting menu, with a ‘palate cleanser’ after each serving.

By using these otherwise annoying and disruptive tasks to link my daily activities together, I find that I re-charge between each larger project and give my brain a rest. Then, when a bigger, meatier assignment comes my way, I’m hungry again and feeling good I just polished off that five-to-ten minute task a moment before.

Before, I would be staring down the barrel of the proverbial gun when I looked at my task checklist. “*Sigh* That’s going to take me a whole flipping hour to get it done…”

Now, the more boxes ticked, the hungrier I become to cross off the rest of my action items for the day. I get the momentum started early due to this little switch and implementation of the Ten Minute Rule.

Two is too short. Give Ten a shot.

Any other productivity hacks from monkeys out there? What behavioral changes have you made recently at work or at home that allows you to churn out high-quality output? And I don’t mean a breakfast of coffee…

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