The 12-Minute Method

Beat Procrastination, be more productive and finally do that thing you’ve been meaning to do

The 12-Minute Method is for you if you know what it’s like to be stuck in creative hell.

It’s for you if you have seen great ideas pass you by and you want to draw a line in the sand.

It’s for you if you want to stop making excuses and start doing work that matters.

It’s for you if you want to stop wasting time and start having time on your side.

It’s for you if you want to stop wasting your potential and start fulfilling it.

At least, that’s what it was for me.

The Origin of the 12-Minute Method

Excerpt from How to Start (a book, business or creative project) When You’re Stuck:

The 12-Minute Method emerged from my struggles. Setting out on a new journey, into a new part of my life, I was looking at myself deeply for the first time. And I noticed something. I was scared – really scared – of sharing anything of myself online. I hadn’t always been that way, but in 2016, I was. Yes, I was scared of sharing anything I had created, but even of sharing a post on Facebook. It filled me with anxiety, causing tension to rise in my chest.

More important to me than social media though was creating things. I hadn’t always held myself back when creating things, but for the years leading up to 2016, I had. I was very aware that two great ideas had passed me by, moving on in the way Liz Gilbert describes in Big Magic, to someone else. The chance for me to be the person who had made them was gone. And I didn’t want that to happen again.

But more important to me than missing out on ideas was that I wanted to create. I wanted to share myself with the world. So, I took this fear to my coach at the time, Joel Monk, and gradually, things shifted. I shared a poem I had written, then a longer article. But the real shift, the thing that made all the difference for me, the moment that really marked the start of the 12-Minute Method, happened when Joel shared that in his previous career as a visual artist, he had liked to create series of paintings. What if, he asked, I created a series of articles?

We had spoken about how I valued the time I had to myself on my short train journey from Clapham Junction to Waterloo each day, so we designed a practice to overcome my fear of sharing myself online, and to allow me to create something. Here was the practice:

Write on the train. Start when the train starts moving, stop when the train stops. Then, proofread it once and share it online.

No time to get in my own way. Just time to write and share.

We agreed that I would do this five times over the next two weeks. This was important, partly because it was a way to make sure I didn’t give up if the first one terrified or embarrassed me too much. I chose to post them on LinkedIn, because I thought no one really read LinkedIn.

After posting five articles, however, I noticed something was happening. People – a handful of people, but real people nonetheless – had responded warmly to those five pieces. I went on holiday after those five pieces, with that feedback and the experience of writing and sharing them in my mind. When I got back, I committed to writing one article each week from then on. One per day or five every two weeks felt like too many. But one article on my train journey every week, I could do.

After a while, my circumstances changed and I didn’t need to take the train daily anymore, so I checked how long the journey took the next time I travelled from Waterloo to Clapham Junction. It took 12 minutes.

So, on weeks when I didn’t get the train, I would set a timer for 12 minutes.

I would write when the timer was going, stop when the timer stopped. Proofread it once and post it on LinkedIn. Once a week. As I write this, that practice has been going now for five years and one week. You can now read those blogs on this site.

Strangely, the train from Clapham Junction to Waterloo (or back) almost never lasts exactly 12 minutes. Often, it’s 8 or 9 or 11. A few times a day it lasts 12 minutes though, so here we are: The 12-Minute Method.

Gradually, as the practice continued, I realised that something was happening as I wrote the pieces – something quite powerful.

First, I began to see that I was changing through this practice; my sense of “Who I am” was being changed.

Second, something was being created.

And a pattern was emerging.

As I’ll describe in Chapter 1 – It’s Time To Start, I saw this pattern clearly three times in my own life – then I began to see it elsewhere. The 12-minute writing practice had exposed a truth about human experience that, somehow, I’d never known. Not knowing it had held me back from being better, and doing more, in almost every aspect of my life. That truth is this:

If you start something and do it regularly – even for only 12 minutes each week – and keep doing it, after a few years you’ll have something – and it might be something magical.

That is the essence of the 12-Minute Method.

The 12-Minute Books

Three years into this practice, inspired a little by Seth Godin’s What Does It Sound Like When You Change Your Mind I began to consider what would happen if I put together all the 12-minute pieces into a book. My friend Steve asked me if the book could fulfil the story of the practice, essentially: I have written this book in 12-minutes, that’s all it took, what can you do?

And it turned out it could.

I had been writing for three years in an emergent way: writing about what I was curious about on a particular day. And through those three years I had been wrestling with how to do the things I wanted to do… even when I was scared, struggling and all over the place.

So, almost by accident, I had written not just any book, but a book about something specific. A book about wrestling with creative potential, about doing the things we want to do but are scared of, about starting even when we feel stuck. And I had written it 12 minutes at a time.

What I had written was, in some ways, new to me - I never set out to create it. What I found when I divided the pieces I had written in those first three years up, was that they fell into four distinct categories. These four categories could have been the four parts of one book, but in the end - to enable people to find just the part that they want help with - will each be the subject of a book in the 12-Minute Method series.

And so as well as the practice, this is the 12-Minute Method:

1. Start - we can’t make anything if we don’t start. Yet I had failed to start so many different things over the years.

2. Keep Going - this, in some ways, is the hardest bit. It means starting over and over again, not letting things slip. At some point, all of us have given up on things in our lives before we should have.

3. Create the Conditions for Great Work - if we want to do really great work, we have to create the conditions for that to happen. We can’t control creativity, we can’t control much in the complexity of the modern world, and we certainly can’t control when we make something that feels truly great, truly magical. But we can do things that make us more likely to create something; more likely to do great work. [Notice that this is not the first thing to do - don’t wait to create the conditions before you start. That’s peak Resistance. First, only start.]

4. Share It - finally, we have to share our work. At least, we do if we want to make a difference to people beyond ourselves. And the sharing, as my story shows, can feel like the hardest part. And it can be the most transformative.

The books in the series aren’t a ‘how to’ in the traditional sense. Creativity and humanity are both far too complex for me to be able to write a set of answers that work for everyone - and anyone who tells you different is lying. What the books - and the blog - do instead is to collect inspiration for you at each stage of the journey of making work and putting it into the world, whether that’s a book, a business or something else.

But not just any inspiration. Practical inspiration, test driven by me and learned from leaders in fields like business, leadership, psychology and coaching. Inspiration that I hope will help you beat procrastination, be more productive, and finally get your idea off the ground.

The world will, I believe, be changed by ordinary people like you and me having ideas and making them reality.

Let’s do that together.

And let’s start by starting.