By John Sonmez October 28, 2012

Maximize Productivity in 15 Minutes

I like to procrastinate.

I don’t really enjoy procrastinating, but it is one of my weaknesses. I’ll delay doing something that I know is important until the last moment that it needs to be done.

I’ve learned to overcome this weakness of mine by trying to be more productive to compensate for it.

Blah, blah, blah, productivity system… procrastination… blah blah blah!

I know you’ve heard it all before, but here is the strange part—I almost always get things done well before the deadline.

So what is my problem then?

My problem is that when I sit down to actually do the work, I end up doing a million other little things.

Even though I am overcoming the results of my procrastination by self-imposing much earlier deadlines, I am still fighting against the core of my procrastinating nature.

It is like I have put the angry demon of procrastination in a cage where he can’t harm me, but because I have to constantly feed him and deal with his demands, he’s still slowing me down.

I call it micro-procrastination

Perhaps you suffer from it to.

The symptoms are as follows:

Sit down to do work and first check Facebook, Twitter, emails and every other single site that could have something interesting and updated for you.

Justify in your head that you need a 10 minute or so transition period to check all this stuff before you sit down to actually do the work you intend.

Pick something smaller that is not important and work on that instead. (Clean out email inbox, etc.)

Just about every week, my goal for the week is to record 2 modules for whatever my next Pluralsight course is.

I really never miss this goal, but it would often take me a while to get started each night. I would sit down to do the work, but not actually get to working until about 30 minutes to an hour after when I had first sat down at the computer.

Once I got started, I usually found that I didn’t have any problem continuing with the work until it was finished.

I tended to do the same thing with my blog posts as well. I know now I need to get a blog post down each week, but it would always take me a while to get started writing the post itself.

Even when I went to write code or solve a programming problem, I noticed that I would try to do many other work related activities like answering emails or further investigating a problem, rather than just working solely focused on the task at hand.

I started to notice a common occurrence between all of these situations in my life. If I got about 15 minutes into actually doing my Pluralsight course, writing my blog posts, or coding up a feature, I’d almost always end up staying focused on the task.

I found that I would often not want to quit something once I got started. I’d even miss lunch or be late for lunch or bed because of this.

The 15 minute rule is born

Based on this observation, I decided to try a little experiment. The next time I was going to work on something, instead of doing my usual ritual of checking email, checking twitter etc, I did the following steps:

Pick out the single task I am sitting at the computer getting prepared to work on. (It helps to define this very clearly.) Turn of all distractions for 15 minutes or just decide not to let them bother me for that time period. Work without pause, without break and without excuse for 15 minutes straight. At the end of 15 minutes, if I want to quit, then I can quit or multi-task.

What I found is that after 15 minutes of working steadfast and diligently on a single task, I didn’t want to quit.

I found that something that I had no motivation or desire to actually be working on 15 minutes before was now all I could think about.

I found that just like it takes the first few chapters to get into a book and actually feel compelled to continue reading it, it takes about 15 minutes for me to get drawn into my work and want to see it finished.

I’ve been applying this “15 minute rule” pretty regularly now, and I have been having some pretty fantastic results.

I’ve also slipped up on occasion and reverted back to my old ways and have had quite the opposite of results.

I’ve tried other systems

Now I’ve definitely tried many other systems that attempt to solve the problem of procrastination or productivity or both, but none of them seemed to work all that well for me.

I know these other systems work, and I know plenty of people are successful with them and that my system isn’t really much of a system at all—it’s just what I do.

The problem I have found with other systems though, is that they are either:

Too complicated to apply regularly unless you are 100% devoted. (Big barrier to entry.)

Only address productivity, and priority, but not actually doing work.

Assume you can sit down and actually do what you have set out to do. (Which remember, was the hardest part for me.)

I am a big fan of Getting Things Done and I highly recommend it. At the very least read it, because it just has some great overall advice, but…

I don’t apply it anymore, because I don’t need to organize what I need to get done. My life is currently so packed and scheduled every day that I already know exactly what I need to be doing just about every hour of my day.

I don’t even watch TV or movies… Ever. No really, I mean never ever.

So, with my schedule being so packed, my biggest problem isn’t figuring out what I should be doing—I’ve got that covered. Instead, my biggest problem is doing it efficiently.

The closest technique to what I am doing is probably the Pomodaro technique. I also think this is a great technique and is likely to work for many people.

I’ve just found that my mind tends to defeat the technique by telling me that I don’t have enough time to get a whole Pomodoro done right now, so I should just do part of one.

You could call what I am doing a modified Pomodoro technique, whereby I set the duration to 15 minutes and actually try to avoid taking breaks for as long a possible.

Why the 15 minute rule works

I suspect the main reason why this technique works is because of momentum.

When we start to get momentum going for us (and 15 minutes seems to be just about enough time to do so) it is much harder to change course.

Focus is also a big part of the 15 minute rule. The world today is a fast paced multi-tasking parallel processing rat race in which we are conditioned to switch our attention between multiple things all at once.

If you are reading this post right now, you probably have even switched back and forth between multiple browser tabs or chat windows or something else and aren’t focusing 100% on reading. I don’t have 15 minutes to grab your full attention and draw you in (unless you are a very slow reader, in which case I congratulate you for making this far.)

The point is, we have to purposely focus on a single thing in order to turn off that natural tendency to try to be omnipresent.

Doing the 15 minute rule forces me to focus, and that focus tends to shut off everything else in my mind with has the potential to distract me.

The 15 minute rule also prevents me from overthinking about a problem and standing back to admire the problem instead of working on it.

It frees me from obligation. If I know I have to work for 15 minutes, I am not afraid of not making much progress. My only obligation is to be working on the task at hand, without interruption and with complete focus for 15 minutes.

I also find that after 15 minutes, I’ve developed a commitment to the work. Because of the time I’ve already invested in the task, I feel more compelled to complete it.

Applying the rule

Hopefully you’ll find this technique useful and if not perhaps you have a better suggestion or technique. If you do I’d very much like to hear it, since I am always looking for some practical ways to be more efficient.

Before I let you be on your way, I’ll leave you with some parting advice that I’ve found useful when applying the 15 minute rule.