Do Anything in 20 Minutes
I spend lots of time on math, exercise, hanging out with loved ones, and exploring interesting things.
But sometimes, I need to do something concrete. These things are ‘tasks’ in my to-do list. Examples includes coding, writing, literature review, planning, emails, workshops, personal finance, mathematical derivations and more!
I’ve realised that any task I get can be shrunk to a twenty minute job. This motivates myself to do things a lot.
Here’s how.
Tasks seek to accomplish goals. So when I get a task, I think of the minimal of goals associated with it.
I then list different tasks that achieve the same set of goals. Then, I remove things from those tasks even more, such that the goals are still achieved to the same order of magnitude. If the goal involves numbers, like ‘make 100 things’ or ‘invite 20 people’, I divide it by 10 and see if it really makes a difference.
Most of the time, cutting specs like this doesn’t affect the end goals at all. And at the end of this, I’ve reduced a big task to a twenty minute job.
Here’s an example.
Last week, I had to run a workshop on formalising physics. On the surface, this meant making a 10 pages long slide show, writing a script, making invites, writing example code, and so on. A big task! It could probably take a day! I aimed for 30 people to come.
But what was the goal? Well, I thought about what the task was trying to achieve. At its core, it was to make people excited about contribute to the Phys LEAN projects, and make people aware of it.
For my workshop, I realised that I could just have one title slide, and spend most of the time showing a screen share of me playing a LEAN game. And then just show the website of cool projects pages on the screen share too. I also realised that 10 people would be fine, so just threw a link on the discord the week before.
Job done!