The ten-minute rule

October 19, 2026

The rule is simple: if something will take less than ten minutes, do it now. Not after lunch, not once the inbox is clear. Now.

I kept a rough tally for a month of the things I had been postponing. Replacing a light bulb, booking a haircut, answering a message I had already read twice. Almost all of them took under ten minutes. The postponing, the small guilt each time I remembered, took far longer.

The rule fails in one place: it turns into an excuse to do only small things. So it has a second half. Once a day, start one thing that will take much longer than ten minutes, and give it the first ten.

Most days the first ten minutes are the hard part. After that, the work tends to keep going on its own.