Some work, especially creative work, acts like a gas: It fills up whatever amount of space you give it.
I’ve looked at timers, Pomodoro setups, and different apps and devices to signal to my brain “This is the time. Use just this time.” But most of them wind up feeling arbitrary and unhelpful.
If I can adjust the timer after I’ve started it, it takes additional willpower to maintain that sense of containing the work.
It got me thinking about something my wife said to our daughter when she was a baby: “You’re an adorable little alarm clock, but you don’t have a snooze button.”
Natural timers
Instead of looking for just the right artificial timer, I started thinking about where I see hard edges and clear boundaries within a day.
If I get up before sunrise to work on things, I know I can’t press snooze on The Sun.
If I start a task with a warm cup of coffee, I can tell myself it needs to be done before that coffee gets cold (or drank) and needs a warm up.
Or, and this is a little TMI, if it’s a full pot of coffee sized task, I have to check off that to-do by the time I need to head to the bathroom.
I can look at the calendar and see what events can’t be moved, and tell myself I need to finish something before that next thing starts. I can’t just say “ten more minutes, please” to a class I need to go teach, or picking my daughter up from school.
When and how I spend my willpower
It takes that little extra bit of intention to find the right time to start, but the benefit for me comes in knowing there’s a clear, definite place to end. There are consequences for going beyond that boundary.
It’s especially helpful for some creative tasks that can easily drag on into procrastination, like perfecting an outline or fiddling with proofreading a document.
Instead of needing to spend willpower deciding on the start and end point of a task, I’m only picking one.
This Builds Character 