The 10-Minute-A-Day Club
How much can you get done in just 10 minutes a day? You might be surprised.
The 10-Minute-A-Day Club
Several years ago, I was in an accountability group. It was an email loop. We set our goals and then reported back. I noticed that often people wrote long emails about not having the time to write. It must have taken them ten to fifteen minutes to write these long missives. I started to wonder how much progress they could have made if they had just taken the same amount of time to work on their novels.
So, I did some figuring. Let’s say you write at about 1000 words an hour. That’s about 18 words a minute. So, in just 10 minutes you would write 180 words. If you did that every day, in one week you would produce (assuming a five-day workweek) 900 words. That’s a blog article, a piece of flash fiction, a part of a chapter in a book. In a month, we have an average of 22 workdays. So, in a month that would be 3,960. That’s a short story, four blog articles or flash fiction pieces, one or two chapters in a book, a short story, or a magazine article. In a year, that’s 46,800 words. That’s a couple of novellas or just a short novel. It is four or five short nonfiction eBooks, two screenplays, 50 or so blog posts, or 10-15 magazine articles or short stories.
That’s just 10 minutes a day. So, we started the 10-Minute-a-Day club. We pledged to write for 10 minutes a day. Anyone can find 10 minutes to write. If not all at once, then in two five-minute sections. A network TV show has 20 minutes of commercial time, just muting half the commercials and writing during them gets you that time. A coffee break or taking 10 minutes from your lunch hour.
Also, it forms a daily creative habit. Writing consistently makes it easier to get into a creative mindset. It becomes a habit, even a conditioned response in a way. If you write, even if you don’t feel like it at first, it can help shake off the cobwebs. Many times, the creative impulse kicks in after you start writing.
The 10-Minute-A-Day routine also helped people beat creative inertia. Newton’s first law of motion says that a body at rest will remain at rest until it is acted on by a force sufficient to displace it. A routine that you practice daily whether you feel “inspired” or not can break through that inertia. Many found that after writing for 10 minutes, they wanted to keep writing. One person said, “Words are like peanuts. Once you start you don’t want to stop.”
So, if you find yourself unable to find any big slots of time to write, maybe you need to consider joining the 10-Minute-a-Day club.