Twenty minutes

For most of my life I believed that anything worth doing needed a long, uninterrupted block of time. A free weekend. A quiet evening. Those almost never arrive, so mostly I did nothing.

This year I tried the opposite: twenty minutes, every day, at the bench. Not a project, not a goal, just twenty minutes. If I want to stop after that, I stop.

The first surprise was how much fits in twenty minutes once you stop waiting for the perfect conditions. Sharpen one chisel. Cut one joint. Sand one face. Sweep the floor and put the tools back where they belong.

The second surprise was that the work began to continue in my head. I would be on the train thinking about the angle of a dovetail, and the next evening I would walk in already knowing what to do.

I am not claiming this is a method. It is just the first habit that has lasted longer than a few weeks. The trick, if there is one, is that twenty minutes is too small to feel like a commitment, so there is nothing to resist.

Four months in, there is a small box on the shelf that did not exist in January. It took about forty sessions. I could not have told you that in advance, and I am glad I did not try.