By Jim McCarthy Jul 21, 2009 4 comments

Egg Timer Update

I had a successful dry run using the Egg Timer Method that I described yesterday.

Basically, there’s an issue that I’ve been trying to get some clarity on for a week or so now, so I set aside the seven minutes and just wrote my thoughts on my whiteboard as they came to me.  I was really strict about the seven minutes, not even stopping to take a sip of water or anything.  Just stormin’.

At the end of the seven minutes, I had discovered an angle on the problem that was completely new.  I hadn’t solved it, mind you.  Lots more to solve, but I did discover that I had missed a whole way of looking at this problem because I’d simply been thinking too conventionally.

In fact, I had set aside just 30 minutes to think about this issue, but the initial direction my seven minutes of concentration took me gave me so much more to think about that I stayed on it for closer to 90 minutes.

I used it again later in the day to develop some material for a presentation that I’m working on.  There were a couple parts of the presentation I simply hadn’t been able to muster the energy to finish, but using the Egg Timer Method, I knew that after seven minutes, I could slack off again.  This way, I got a lot done.  It just seemed far less open-ended.

So I can recommend you try it and see where it takes you.

BTW, I didn’t actually get an egg timer.  I realized that my iPhone doubles as an excellent countdown timer.

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4 Comments

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    December 6th, 2010

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    December 9th, 2010

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