When our children were small and coming up with excuse after excuse for why they didn’t have time to clean their rooms, the 10 minute tidy strategy helped us move through procrastination, resistance and get results.

Thinking about all the tasks that need to go into accomplishing a significant goal can be daunting.  Just like helping our children engage in the room cleaning project, strategies that help me “just start” on a new project help me get results sooner.  What we discovered was that the 10 minute commitment often stretched into more time invested in tidying the room.  The kitchen timer was always set for 10 minutes with a choice to continue or not past the buzzer.

What’s the 10 Minute Tidy Strategy?

Rather than asking for a commitment to complete the entire project, we just ask for a 10 minute commitment to START the project.  Because the commitment is small and the “pain” is low, it was easy to see that the “gain” from starting the project was worth the effort.

In the cleaning example, the children could easily see that agreeing to 10 minutes to tidy their rooms was preferable to hearing me nag for more than 10 minutes and potential loss of privileges or other negative consequences.

When you apply the 10 minute tidy strategy for your project, you’ll also reap benefits by checking off some of the tasks and being satisfied that you have started a project that will reap more benefits to your life or business.

If I still find I am procrastinating, I consider bringing down the commitment or “cost” by making the task smaller, shorten the period of time or otherwise making it easier for me to say “yes” and execute!