Can 20 Minutes Deliver a Measurable Win? Or Is It Just Dead Air?
I detest 20-minute schedule gaps. Always have.
20 minutes is long enough to feel like you should be doing something important. But for me, these periods almost always result in an email death spiral.
At least this is how I felt until I stumbled across a weirdly titled Word document on our family computer:
ADHD-A**Kicker.txt (asterisks mine, lol)
Inside were forty household tasks, each of which looked like they’d take about 20 minutes. Unload the dishwasher. Wipe baseboards. Gather stray dog toys. All numbered 1-40 by priority.
It was absurdly simple (and exactly the kind of genius idea my husband would come up with). That night, I couldn’t help but ask whether this philosophy could apply to my role as a busy executive.
Could I really move the needle on high-impact work…20 minutes at a time?
The Gap Nobody Plans For
It’s a valid question. A March 2023 Future Forum survey of over 10,000 desk workers found that executives spend an average of 25 hours a week in meetings.
And if my experience is any indication, 30 minute “dead time” between meetings is common.
But it’s not really 30 minutes, is it? When meetings run over (or we take a needed post-meeting stretch break), that leaves just 20 minutes to get something done.
So what do you do? The easiest thing is to shrug, open Outlook, and reply to emails. Even if that’s not a valuable use of time.
What If…
Wrestling with the problem, I wondered whether the real villain wasn’t the gap, but showing up without a pre-loaded move.
In other words, could it be possible to “hack the gap” simply by stripping out the start-time decisions?
The Experiment
I decided to try my husband’s strategy—and the first step was to brainstorm a list of tasks I could start and finish within 20 minutes. The first pass, straight from my head, turned out to be laughable. I wrote things like:
- Prep for tomorrow’s meetings (plural, ha!)
- Build a workshop outline (turns out, this takes multiple hours)
- Answer pinned emails (also multiple hours, since these typically require reading and responding to involved questions).
My problem was common to people with ADHD: it’s called time blindness. I struggle to intuitively sense how much time has passed, which means I’m terrible at estimating how long something will take.
Combine that with 20 years of building workflows around major deliverables (rather than small milestones), and this experiment quickly became more difficult than I thought.
Turning to AI for Help
I saw two ways AI could help with my problem.
- First, it could help me brainstorm an overall list much faster (and with more entries), allowing me to focus on editing and tailoring the list to my work.
- Secondly, it could help me think through how to break down common projects into smaller sprints. (In addition to ChatGPT, I came to love the “Magic ToDo” tool from goblin.tools).
I had to play around with the prompts a bit, but eventually, I had a list I felt good about. And after just a week of using it, I was amazed at the results.
Not only did I accomplish measurably more (which reduced my stress level), but I had more fun doing it. Completing a task under the 20-minute mark became a fun challenge, giving me a similar dopamine hit as getting to “Inbox Zero.”
(If you want the prompts I used to build my list, they’re waiting in the toolkit link below.)
Making Tiny Work Work
Psychologists Teresa Amabile & Steven Kramer call this the Progress Principle: tiny wins spark more momentum than occasional big leaps.
And this doesn’t just apply to individuals.
“Few KPIs ever get ‘saved’ in a last-minute scramble; they’re stitched together from the tiny time bets we make all quarter long.”
Here’s what I learned about making those tiny wins pile up:
1. Be ruthless about what makes the list.
To get my list right and ensure I felt a sense of accomplishment, I had to set some rules. For me, a task earns the list only if it:
- Produces a tangible artifact or decision, or
- Unblocks someone else, or
- Advances a larger deliverable
2. Rank order the tasks.
I treat my list like an Agile backlog. Tasks are ranked by priority, and that ranking shifts as my circumstances change. (Don’t try “high/medium/low” frameworks…both you and I know, nothing will be labeled “medium” or “low”)
3. Add a definition of done.
I also needed to get clear about what “done” meant for each task. For example, if the task was “review the draft AI policy,” did that mean that I’d read it? Or that I’d also added my comments?
4. Don’t maximize every 20-minute gap.
Breaks are wildly important for our productivity and stress levels.
It’s common that I use a 20-minute gap to refill my coffee, stretch my legs, or (yes) check my email. It’s just that now, those aren’t my only options—and I don’t need to spend a lot of time deciding what to do.
5. Even if you have more than 20 minutes, use a 20-minute task as a kick-start.
I am a procrastinator. Whatever the psychology of it all (and there are lots of theories), starting something is 100x harder for me than finishing it. But not if I start with a 20-minute sprint.
More often than not, momentum kicks in, and I keep going without a lot of resistance. And if not, at least I chipped the ice.
Getting Started: Your 20-Minute Toolkit
First, hit “save” on one 20-minute task that just popped into your head—then grab this toolkit to stockpile 49 more, plus prompts and focus tools to make the most of them.