It’s #Blogtember* day 3! Today’s topic: Pass on some useful advice or information you learned and always remembered. 

Persistance of Memory

“You can do anything for 20 minutes. You can do anything for 20 minutes. You can do anything for 20 minutes.”

That’s the mantra I whisper every Wednesday when I tackle one Hard Task in my life. Sometimes it’s a backlog of email or a sink full of dirty dishes. Yesterday, it was writing this very post. Occasionally the Hard Task is REALLY BIG, like writing a resume for the first time, or sorting through a box of mementos from your first wedding.

The common thread here is that the Hard Tasks are always important, non-urgent things that you would rather not do. They have nebulous deadlines, and emotional weight dragging them to the bottom of every to-do list. (I’m not sure when dirty dishes became an emotionally draining part of my life, but here we are.)

Over the years I’ve learned that no matter which way you slice it, there’s only one solution to keep a Hard Task from growing harder.  Just start doing it. You don’t have to finish, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. No matter how slow, how bad, how hard it is, you can do anything for 20 minutes. Set a timer and dig in.

I have found that proclaiming Wednesday as Anti-Procrastination Day (thanks, Flylady!) helps me prioritize focus time for Hard Tasks once a week. Keeping a variety of attractive timers at my disposal is another trick I use to get started. I reserve my favorites for the worst Hard Tasks, since using them makes things more fun. It seems silly to admit, but a lot of big moments in my life have been measured by this ridiculous racing snail online timer.

Snail Timer

So on this third day of Blogtember, I share with you my completely unsolicited advice. It’s not sexy, it’s not profound, but it is really, really useful: You can do anything for 20 minutes. Especially with a cheerful timer in your arsenal of tools! I’m not delusional. I know that 20 minutes is not enough time to cure cancer or attain world peace. But is is long enough to get started, and that’s often the hardest part.