The Beauty of the Timer: pressure, choice and freedom
There is no 'talker's block'.
That's a Seth Godin idea that I was reading in an old article of mine as I began work on 12-Minute Method Book 3 (book 2 is now out of course, so it's on to the next one).
The important thing about that is, if you write how you talk, then you can't really have writer's block either.
And yet today, with the timer going, I sat for a minute and no words came. Then I remembered Godin's words, and the beauty of the timer, and I started.
That's the lesson of 12-Minute Method Book 1, of course: first, only start.
The timer has become a vital component of the way I work. It started with this practice: when I didn't get the train so much any more I needed a way to replicate the pressure and freedom (paradoxical, eh?) of writing on the train. Set the timer for 12 minutes.
But, slowing down and thinking about it, I work with a timer in all my coaching sessions, too. And I work much better with it now than I did years ago (apologies to my early clients, who I ALWAYS ran over with). The power of the timer there is much like the power of the timer here: as one of my clients once said about her life, 'I'm here, so I might as well do something.' We're here, in a coaching session, so we'd better do some work.
I use one in all my coaching engagements too: they are never open-ended, and that's powerful: as the coaching engagement moves towards the end of the timer, the pressure rises. We'd better make this count. And we get to notice our progress: to mark the end of a piece of work before deciding whether to create a new one together.
More recently, absorbing my own myth, my own body of work, I've done it more consciously. When feeling overwhelmed with my 100 Podcasts Challenge I created myself a '12-minute method' for it: 30 minutes once a week to work on scheduling those podcasts is enough.
But the timer doesn't only work that way. I realised, after coming back from paternity leave and choosing to use my business to support the life I want to have and meld it into a four-day week, that the costs of accidentally losing time to email or LinkedIn messages were just too high when I only had four days a week. (This is a good example of how working less doesn't necessarily mean achieving less: I can just cut some slack and be almost as productive... although the people who don't receive LinkedIn or email replies from me for weeks might disagree!)
And so now I try never to spend time on my inbox (email or LinkedIn) without a 20-minute timer on. Even if I carry on after that, I do so with another 20-minute timer, CHOOSING that spending more time on my email is the right thing to do. Or, usually, choosing not to do that.
I have a tendency to drift.
To let myself drift onwards doing things that aren't meaningful or truly joyful. To shy away from the courage that creativity requires. The timer has become a way for me to resist that drift. To awaken myself, through pressure: I'm here and I might as well do something. And through choice: do I really want to carry on with this, now I have been woken up by the timer? And through freedom: the timer is going, I know I won't be here forever, I know what I will do is limited by the timer, but within that structure, all I have is space.
And in space, if we create it, things emerge.
That dance, structure and space, stability and novelty, order and chaos, is at the heart of all existence. It is only everything and only everwhere.
And the awareness of that, the ability we have to create the structures that we need for space. And to add in more space when our structures are stultifying. That awareness is one of the most powerful tools we have to create the changes we want in our lives.
And that is the beauty of the timer.
—
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
The first two 12-Minute Method books are out now!
Sign up to my mailing list to receive digests of 12-minute articles every month or two.