15 Minutes

We recently received an email from Hannah Brencher where she confessed to being a ‘recovering resolutions addict’. She spoke of how she loves the possibilities a fresh calendar brings, but how she quickly feels overwhelmed by all the things she wants to do as well as all the things she thinks will magically happen just because 1 Jan arrives.

Sound familiar?!

Now that we find ourselves just over halfway through 2021, if we’re honest with ourselves, there’s probably a few New Year’s resolutions we haven’t made as much progress on as we’d hoped.

Luckily, Hannah’s email unpacked an idea that she refers to as ‘The 15 Minute Rule’ that we think might just help us get back on track.

We often forget that building the discipline to make the changes our New Year’s resolutions require takes time and is a muscle we need to train little by little. Hence the idea of tackling something in 15 minute increments.

It’s a simple idea as most of us have 15 minutes, and if we don’t, they shouldn’t be too difficult to find. Then we simply need to set a timer and start.

With just 15 minute we can make progress in a direction that is important to us and, whilst most tasks won’t be complete within this time, we’ll absolutely be closer to our end goal than we were before we set the timer.

Progress is often made from small things done on repeat.

Think sourcing hard to find requirements for our next project with needle and thread, transferring that all too complicated design, practising a technique we’re yet to master or working on a sizeable project we think we’ll never get through, when we look for the tiny threads within a larger task, 15 minutes will eventually see us achieve all that we set out to accomplish.

We just need to make the space and start where we are, and best of all, we don’t have to wait for 1 Jan to arrive as, if we use the second half of 2021 well, those New Year’s resolutions we set at the beginning of the year might just come to pass after all.