My one little word of the year is TEN. Yes, as in the number. I chose this word because I have a lot of goals I want to achieve this year (SO MANY), and as a friend told me in January, “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.” One thing I can do is move closer to my goals in small increments, something I learned a few years ago when I took part in a ten minutes per day challenge. In the challenge, you picked three goals for the month and committed to dedicating ten minutes per day for six days a week (sabbaths are important) to each. That’s it, just ten. Set a timer for ten minutes, work on the goal, give yourself a checkmark for the day and then move on to something else.

I didn’t think it was going to work.

It worked.

At the time, one goal was cleaning up my counter by going through my mail, which had all gotten out of control. By the time the month was over, I had cleaned that counter and an entire bookshelf. I was working on a writing goal then, too, and made a lot of headway on that. Another time, I chose yoga for one of my goals, so found a week-long challenge from Sarah Beth Yoga. In it, she suggested that it was better to spend ten minutes per day doing yoga than trying to find an hour per week, especially if finding that hour was a challenge. Confirmation from a yogi!

I’m reminded of this because I am overwhelmed by and behind on everything for reasons I have already detailed here (the biggest being a change in my schedule). Sometime last week, I decided to use the Pomodoro technique and for my ten-minute breaks to focus on doing chores I had been ignoring. The big one was cleaning off my desk, so that I could actually sit down and work without wanting to bang my head against my desk. There are other things I want/need to do like cleaning off the loveseat in my bedroom and, eventually, cleaning my closet so I can rearrange my room.

I have mentioned before that I am prone to all or nothing thinking. By using the ten minutes per day method, I break myself out of that by seeing how much I can do instead of how much I want to do. This also goes with my to-do list philosophy of breaking tasks down into minute parts. When I do that, I don’t beat myself up for everything that needs to be done but instead give myself credit for what I have managed to do.

(I would post my to-do list, but it is INSANE even by my standards.)

The other benefit of doing the Pomodoro for work is that I give my eyes a break, something I desperately need to do but often don’t. (When I grade away from home, I bring a book and use the break for that, though I do five-minute breaks instead.) The eye fatigue is real, but the breaks help, which means I am also engaging in more than one act of self care.

Plus, if all else fails, I remind myself that I can do just ten minutes of a task since getting started is usually the hard part.