Want To Change Your Life? It Only Takes 15 Minutes
Summary. With all of life’s obligations, making time for our passions and curiosities can feel increasingly difficult. But a simple 15minute trick could get you further than you think.
We all want more time to pursue our passions. Maybe it’s finally learning how to play the guitar. Or it’s starting that book club or podcast. But between family, work, and all of life’s obligations, it can feel hard to find the time we need to put in the effort needed.
For me it’s always been making music. And more recently, it’s been the idea of sharing my lessons and ideas on productivity, growth and resilience, through writing.
What’s held me back has been the age-old issue of time. For a period, I felt like I didn’t have enough of it and when I finally did have it - usually at the end of each workday - I’d be too tired to work on my side projects. And while my excuses felt very true – excuses often are true – they still didn’t help me shake the feeling that I wasn’t pursuing the things that held real meaning and purpose to me. No matter how much I convinced myself that there was a good reason for not having done something, I couldn’t get rid of that itch at the back of my mind.
Our Subconscious Remembers Our Curiosities
I imagine this is a relatively common scenario. We make new year’s resolutions to work out, or start that blog or side hustle. But life gets in the way. So, we keep kicking the can down the road and eventually end up suppressing our desires and backwards rationalising the situation. Backwards rationalizing never getting started.
The funny thing is that quite often, those things we‘ve suppressed – our curiosities - keep coming back. It’s as if our sub-conscious has a funny way of giving us reminders about these curiosities, passions, and desires, until we at least take the time to scratch the itch.
When it came to making music and writing, no matter how much I put it off – usually for understandable reasons – I’d often come back to the feeling of “I just have to do it, or I’ll always be kicking myself if I don’t. If I could just get that bit of momentum and get a chain of consistency going, maybe I might achieve something.”
The 15 Minute Rule
One thing that’s helped me is something I call the 15-minute rule. It’s something that’s helped me make more time for my side projects and passions, from writing more, making more music, and even getting through a 70-day streak of daily exercise.
The 15-minute rule is the simple idea that if something takes 15 minutes, then it’s not that difficult or disruptive to my day, and the conditions for which to do it don’t necessarily have to be ideal. Therefore, I might as well just get started. The best part about the 15-minute rule, is that it doesn’t always have to be true. It can be a trick. You’re essentially tricking your mind into believing a task will only take a short amount of time, which immediately makes it that much less daunting. A session to “write a first draft” suddenly becomes a “short brain storming session”. A session to “research how to create a website” just becomes “a quick session on YouTube”. What often ends up happening is that once we’ve gotten started, we end up working beyond that 15 minute mark and actually producing something quite interesting and valuable.
Knowing my tendency to over complicate and grandiose tasks and activities, this 15-minute rule is what’s helped me get started on most projects, and eventually go on to make meaningful progress. It’s what’s helped me overcome the tyranny of the blank page or blackhole of no ideas at the start of creative sessions. It’s often created just enough momentum to get me into the flow and make progress. Consistently.
So, if you’re struggling to make time for those projects you’ve always wanted to start, it might be worth trying the 15-minute rule. It might just get you further than you think.
