No. 6 Featured
The forty-minute rule
Why I stopped planning my days in hours and started planning them in forty-minute blocks.
An hour is a strange unit for creative work. It is too long to stay fully focused and too short to feel like a real session. Forty minutes, for me, is the sweet spot.
How it works
- Pick one task small enough to make visible progress on.
- Work on it for forty minutes, phone in another room.
- Stop, even mid-sentence. Write one line about where to pick up.
The last step is the important one. Stopping mid-sentence sounds frustrating, but it makes starting the next block almost effortless. Hemingway said something similar about ending the day's writing while you still know what comes next.