In a new post, Tiffany Yates Martin says you don’t always have to do your best. “We’re inculcated, particularly in American culture, with messages that exhort us to do something 100% or not do it at all: Go big or go home,” she says. “Only first place matters and everyone else is just an also-ran. Winning is everything.”
This attitude is why habits are easy to break. When you ruin your perfect score, it’s easy to skip the next opportunity. This can apply to the gym, a diet, or our writing habits. Sometimes life gets in the way, sometimes we take on new or different projects that eat into our time. Meanwhile, our writing goals get pushed to the back burner.
This happened to Yates Martin, as her editing and teaching commitments – which she enjoys – cut into her writing time – which she also values. She turned to James Clear’s book Atomic Habits (ed note – as have we). The book suggests starting with small habits to build routines. Yates Martin endorses the two-minute commitment. “A main foundation of building a habit is showing up consistently, as anyone who has ever tried to follow the writing advice of getting your butt in the chair every day knows,” she says. “And the main reason we get derailed is because we don’t seem to be able to find blocks of time as life creeps past the boundaries we’ve set around our intention.”
The solution? Start with just two minutes. That might seem crazy. Work on my novel for two minutes? It takes that much time to get a mug of coffee and a snack. Nonetheless, two minutes is achievable. You might think it funny to set aside a whole two minutes for a task, but think how dumb you’ll feel telling yourself you literally do not have two minutes of free time in your day.
“The first day I poked at a few sentences, rearranged some things I had already written, and called it a day,” Yates Martin writes.”I faithfully wrote down that I’d written that day, just a green ‘W’ noted in my calendar, but felt a little foolish for calling that a writing day.” However, the next day she wrote for a bit longer. Some days she managed to write for 40 minutes and her manuscript draft is growing. “If I keep this pace up, I may or may not hit my self-imposed goal of finishing it this year,” she says. Life still gets in the way sometimes, but the two required minutes get her into her chair every day.
