This is going to sound ridiculous to those of you who actually work for a living, but you’re getting ten minutes of “work” out of me with this post. It’s my version of rehab. I’m been monumentally undisciplined lately with regard to doing any writing outside of what I have to do for work, so the idea here is to sit down and get ten minutes of uninterrupted “pleasure writing” in the books. I’m forcing myself to do it.

When I sit down to write something, I typically have a dozen tabs set on my browser, and my phone is sitting on my desk to the left of my keyboard. I’ll type a couple of shitty sentences, get distracted, then look at something online, respond to some texts, and then check my email. This is absolute suicide when it comes to being productive, so my plan tonight is to work for ten solid minutes. Just ten – with no distractions, no phone, no email, no interruptions, and no bullshit. Just work.

Tomorrow, you’ll get twelve minutes, or maybe fifteen. Tuesday, I’ll try for twenty. At the seven minute mark of this deal, I went back to do some edits. I omitted one full paragraph of filler that I think I typed simply to keep typing. The copy itself made sense, but it wasn’t in the flow of what I’m trying to say here. I’m sorry this is such a shitty, boring post, but if I’m going to get back to doing anything interesting, I have to relearn how to get that done.

So there you go. Ten minutes got you 280 words, with one pass-through of editing. That wasn’t so bad.