The HI54-APPROVED '20 Minute Timer' Technique For Starting/Setting Daily Habits
** Originally posted July 2020, but sometimes I tweak and/or re-bump up the HI54 homepage because… reduce, reuse, recycle, innit? **.
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Back in November 2017, I started a daily meditation practice that is still going strong today (note: this is still true as of July 2022) — and one of the major components of getting that daily habit set in stone was the simple act of setting a timer for 20 minutes every morning and not getting out of my seat until the sound of chimes began chiming.
Of course, there’s a lot more to meditating than just setting a timer (aka all the mental exercising you get up to while you’re sitting there for those 20 minutes meditating), but I really don’t think I ever would have got anywhere with my daily practice if I wasn’t using such a regimented and hard-to-cheat process as: “Did you set a timer for 20 minutes and sit there until the timer went of? No? Well, then, you don’t get to count today as a day you meditated and the daily streak will be over.”
Without that simple & strict rule, if I had left things up to ‘waiting for when it felt like a good time’ or ‘do it until it felt like it had been long enough’, I’m sure I would have ducked out of sitting for less & less time each day or just easily forgotten to meditate on any given day altogether. But… timer don’t lie.
Fast forward to the end of 2019, when the idea of setting New Years resolutions was at its strongest, and I was feeling drawn towards the idea that this would finally be the year that I become one of those people that actually reads more often. I had gotten decent at collecting books over the years (mostly used/secondhand), and if I ever found myself at the beach I would even read something from my growing collection of unfinished books, but, in general, when it came to sitting down and turning pages on the regular, I was always finding other things to distract myself with (and ‘beach days’ are not a year-round occurrence up here in Canada).
But, since the ‘20 minute timer’ technique was already a proven successful habit forming tool when it came to getting myself into a daily meditation routine (which is my most important habit and something I would highly recommend everyone start doing on a daily basis, for the betterment of not just yourself, but, also, for everyone else in your orbit too), when I came across someone recommending that rather than saying your goal is to ‘read X amount of books in a year’, which is just asking for failure, you should instead aim for ‘reading for X amount of time each day’ —well, that advice really resonated (the sound thinking behind that tip was that not all books are created equal, in both size and readability, so picking an ‘X amount’ to read in a year is not a helpful way to set a realistic target and can also lead you to giving up on the task quite early in the year as that ‘X amount’ becomes more and more unattainable with each passing week/month that you fall further behind reaching that ‘X amount’ for the year).
So, on January 1st, 2020, I put my iPhone timer on double duty and started sitting down to read for at least 20 minutes every day (some days I’ll read a little bit extra to reach a proper stopping point in the book + some days I end up in an ideal ‘beach day’ scenario and read for a lot more than 20 minutes).
And, I gotta say, I’m 6+ months into a daily 20 minute reading schedule and I have already finished more books this year than any other year of my life. I mean, the personal bar was set fairly low, but still, I have already polished off 15+ titles by July (and some of those were THICC f*ckers like Keith Richards autobiography).
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And then one lazy afternoon in Summertime Quarantine 2020, I caught myself kicking myself for still never having found a good way to get into + keep going a consistent daily writing habit, which led to one of those obvious light bulb moments you kick yourself for not having had sooner: What if I took that proven ‘20 minute timer’ process, the one that has worked so well for setting daily meditating & reading habits, and what if I applied it to a daily writing routine?
I mean, I’ve tried the ‘Write X Amount of Words/Pages’ per day advice before (750 words, Morning Pages anyone?), but I never managed to keep those going for more than a month or so — but maybe trying to meet a daily writing goal of ‘X amount of words/pages’ was destined for failure in all the same ways that a ‘Read X Amount Of Books’ target was? Maybe my lazy writing spirit animal was not to blame after all?!
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All I knew for sure was that I had successfully used the ‘20 minute timer’ technique for keeping a daily meditation practice going for 2.5 years AND I had successfully been using that same ‘20 minute timer’ process to keep a daily reading habit going since January 1st, 2020… so why the hell wouldn’t this same approach work for setting a daily writing habit?
True, I suppose the real challenge with continued daily writing is often “what should I write about today?” and not always the physical act of hitting letters on the keyboard— but, so far, I’ve successfully been setting my timer and writing for 20 minutes every morning since July 7th, 2020 and that’s already led to me writing thousands and THOUSANDS of words more than my previous daily writing habit of just thinking about how it’d be nice to have a daily writing habit. I don’t want to jinx things, but… I think the ‘20 minute timer’ approach may have just gone and done it again!
*AUG 2020 UPDATE: turns out thinking of something to write about EVERY DAY is the real challenge, so I adjusted my daily writing rules so that on days when I can't think of what to write about, I can spend 20 minutes editing a previous draft instead (and that's been a useful tweak worth coming back to mention)*JUL 2022 UPDATE: it turns out I kind of fell off the timer approach for both the writing and reading (but I am still using the same approach for an almost 5-years of daily meditating, so… it does work). But, as I re-read this post before re-bumping up the HI54 homepage, it does have me thinking that maybe I should get back into being more regimented about doing more reading & writing (as I am trying to read Dune + I am dumb enough to still be blahg'n).And you might think that writing for only 20 minutes a day is no way to compose anything of value (so what’s the point of even bothering?) but the reality is that once you get the juices flowing and the brain dump dumping, you can either continue writing after your timer goes off OR you can come back and expand/improve upon one of your daily first drafts and turn it into something more polished. For example, the bones of this very blog post were first blurbed out during one of my 20 minute keyboard stretches + there appears to be skeletons for a few more blog posts already partially first drafted in my daily writing Google Doc since I started a couple weeks ago.
Also, don’t underestimate the accumulative power of doing something for a little bit each day — not only do you get daily feelings of accomplishment each time you cross your ‘daily habit’ off your list of things to get done, but it doesn’t take too long before those daily 20 minute exercises grow into something much bigger and better than the sum of their parts.
So, whether you’re trying to get a daily meditating, reading, and/or writing habit going as well, or whether your interests lie in learning an instrument, or painting, or PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING you can want to get better at — I HI54LOFI-ly recommend the practice of setting a timer for 20 minutes each day and doing that thing you want to improve at/do more of until the chimes start chiming (or whatever alarm sound you choose, but Chimes is the best one if you ask me, especially for coming out of a meditation session).
It’s simple and it works and it all adds up quickly.
And just in case it wasn’t obvious, here’s the whole process:
The ‘20 Minute Timer’ Daily Habit-Setting Process
Set a timer for 20 minutes and then start doing the thing that you’re wanting to start doing on a daily basis (meditating, reading, writing, etc) and keep doing that thing until the timer goes off.Once the timer goes off, you can either continue doing the thing for longer if you want / are in a groove, or you can choose to consider yourself done for the day. Mark on your calendar that you did your daily habit thing for the day and enjoy the little dose of 'accomplishment chemicals' now running through your system.Repeat steps 1 and 2 once a day, forever (and remember that Google says it takes 18 to 254 days to form a new habit, with the average amount of days being 66 days — so if you can't keep things up 'forever' at least try to give it a month or 2).
Of course, you can set your timer for more or less time, I’ve just found 20 minutes to be the perfect amount of time for feeling both doable on a daily basis + substantial enough to feel like I actually did something each day. I also don’t have kids or a proper job, so maybe 5 or 10 minutes each day is more realistic for you… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ … but the most important thing is that you just start doing whatever your thing is every day today (tomorrow, at the latest), otherwise you’ll kick yourself later for not having started sooner.
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JEREMY / @HI54LOFI
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