Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The 20 minute win.

The wonderful Jessica Brockmole sent me this a few days ago: The 20 Minute Win. Barbara O'Neal argues that if you can carve out a twenty-minute window in which to write, and guard that twenty minutes against all intrusions, you can make substantial progress.

It's a great piece, and a great idea. I'm going to try the technique today.

How about you? Do you ever set a timer when you sit down to write?

3 comments:

Sonja Foust said...

I'm a fan of the 20-minute thing. UfYH (http://http://unfuckyourhabitat.tumblr.com/) does a similar thing, except with cleaning. Works for writing too!

Jessica Brockmole said...

Absolutely. I can be staring at the screen for an absurdly long amount of time, and then, realizing I have twenty minutes until the kids arrive home from school, bang out a bunch of words. That's why writing sprints work so well for me. A small bite of time, a whole lot of words.

Shoshanna Evers said...

Yup! I use Write Or Die to write 500 words in 15 minutes. Then I do that 4 times. Totally works.