A System for 5, 10, and 15 Minutes

I’ve talked a bit about transitions before, but I’m not sure we’ve given them their proper due

If you’re building your startup in the margins, transitions — going from not working to working on the right thing as quickly as possible — need to be an obsession.

If you have six separate hour-long slots each week, and seven more random 5, 10, or 15 minute gaps, you can’t have 20% of each session spent figuring out what you should work on and ramping up into it. You need a system for the transitions. Your blocked hour needs to be 1 minute of prep, 59 minutes of work. Your 15 minute blocks need to be 15 seconds of prep, 14 minutes 45 seconds of work.

Today, I want to talk about these smaller blocks. The 5, 10, 15 minutes you find yourself with throughout the week.

I like having a specific plan for these, so that my transition time is as small as possible.

Right now, I’ve decided that every unexpected 5, 10, 15 minute block of time I find myself with will be dedicated to podcast growth.

I struggle mightily with pod growth, because my instincts are always to just let it grow organically — “If it’s good, it’ll grow.” The English translation of this is, “If I try to grow it and people don’t like it, my feelings will be hurt,” which isn’t something a professional would let stop them. Act as if.

So, I’ve used ChatGPT to build a plan for my small blocks of time – an effort to smooth transitions and grow the pod.

You can do this, too.

I started by giving it some context:

It gave a pretty good answer, and after a bit of back and forth, I got to a list I liked with some structure to implement over the next eight weeks in one hour each day. Here’s the beginning of it:

But, obviously, these aren’t broken into 15-minute blocks. So, I had it do that for me, specifically from my phone, as that’s where I often find myself with these pockets:

Next, I gave it the structure for the tasks and projects I use in Notion, and had it map the whole thing out. It sends me a list each day, and I update it as I finish things.

So, now, whenever I have 5 or 10 or 15 minutes, I go to my Notion 15-minute list and jump directly in. The pod is up 5% this week solely because I’ve put those random blocks of time to work.