The Imperfectionist: The power of 15 minutes (and other ideas)

go for a walk with a notebook, list the points that seem most compelling to me, put them in a sensible order, then practice a few times, enough to get a feel for the talk but not enough to render it stilted or rote.

be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done. If you’ve decided to work on a given project for fifty minutes, then once fifty minutes have elapsed, get up and walk away from it. Why? Because as Boice explained, the urge to push onward beyond that point ‘includes

You will probably be tempted to go off and “do more research,” but you are not completing the entire project in one sitting. You are only creating the first iteration—a draft of your essay, a sketch of your app, a plan for your campaign. Ask yourself, “What is the smallest version of this I can produce to get useful feedback from others?”

Write three pages of absolutely anything. If you can’t think of what to write, write “I can’t think of what to write.” Keep writing until you have filled three pages. Three pages full of anything, anything at all.