Fifteen minutes.

The lies that I listed in the last post cannot seem to be overcome by my internal battles. Ok, so what are you going to do?

I am going to have more structure in my days. Plan them out the night before. Decide what I am going to do, and then stick to it.

The other is to follow Virginia's advice and do work in 15 minute chunks. No matter how unpleasant, stressful and anxiety-inducing some task is, I can endure it for 15 minutes. She suggests the following rules:

1. Do 15 min. No more no less. Be working the whole time, with no distractions. If you hit a difficulty, or don't know what to do next, use the remaining time to think about the problem and try to find a solution, rather than give up.

2. Increases in work can only be in 15 minute chunks. Don't stretch it out to 20 or 30 min. If you have done 15 min, you can do it again. Take breaks in between for as long as you want, but gaurantee yourself 15 minutes.

3. Work at least 15 min every day. If you make this rule inviolate, there is nothing to think about. No negotiating, no games.

4. Don't think about the end result, concentrate on the pleasures of the work itself. Fantasies about what the end will look like can be good for planning (I think), but can be overwhelming or dispiriting.

I will also take K's advice, and have no more than 5 things to do every day. If one of these is exercise (which naturally takes more than 15 minutes), I am going to be planning to do 4 things of 15 minutes each. That is 1 hour of work. That doesn't sound like much. It sounds like a trifle. It sounds like a scandal! (One natural reason to keep this blog anonymous is that if they found out that I am going to try to get one hour of work done a day, and that this is hard for me, no-one would ever employ me!).

I want at least one of those 15 min to be reading, and one to be writing. The other two can be what they need to be: analysis, errands, whatever. This sounds easy, right?