How To Do Anything

Have you ever wanted to be able to do something? It is very simple actually. We often forget that everything that is accomplished is done in baby steps. There are many saying that go along with this, but none really emphasize the action that needs to take place, they emphasize the patience that needs to take place: "Rome wasn't built in a day." Do you understand the immense power of spending 10 minutes a day on something? We so often feel that we don't have time to do something because it requires us to put aside some chunk of the day. If you could write 275 words per day, you would write 100,000 word novel in a year. This is really nothing -- easily accomplishable in 10 minutes a day. The average reader reads 200 wpm. For 10 minutes a day, that is 730,000 words per year. True that isn't much, but say for the sake of argument that you read for a half an hour a day, and you are slightly above average (as I'm sure anyone reading this is -- or you will get there rather quickly by doing this), then you can read 25 books a year (which is 2 books a month).

I'm really more interested in acquiring skills right now than how much can be accomplished in a year for something ridiculously small as 10 minutes a day. I've already mentioned that spaced practice yields much better results than massed practice. This is a very natural extension of that idea. What do you want to do? Set aside 10 minutes a day, and you can do it rather quickly. I've picked up enough Korean for 10 minutes a day (not even every day) to listen, speak, and comprehend simple things, greet people, say goodbye, and I learn new vocabulary every day. (By the way this is over the 275 word mark for those interested -- in fact, writing to the beginning of the parenthesis every day, it would only take 11 months to write the novel.) The key is to do something every single day, not to do something a lot once a week. The benefits stack up so much when done every day as opposed to 2 hours on Wednesday every week. This is something hard to understand until you've experienced it. I recommend just trying it with something, and you will then understand. If it doesn't work, then stop, but there is no harm in spending 10 minutes on something just to see what the possibilities are.

http://lifehacker.com/software/motivation/jerry-seinfelds-productivity-secret-281626.php
http://dontbreakthechain.com/