By way of introduction, I am Emma Squillace, the Director of Training and Support at iMedExchange. In my work, I spend lots of time talking with physicians about blogs, forums and web based tools they use in their daily routine, and understanding how technology is helping physicians. I am especially interested in what we can do to make things better. I am going to blog periodically about interesting tricks and tips I pick up on blogs and forums. My first post will feature one I found recently...

There's a time-management trick called the 10 minute rule that I really like. Basically it says that if there's something you're putting off, just commit to doing it for 10 minutes. After that time is up you can stop. Most of the time, at 10 minutes into a task it doesn't seem nearly as bad as it did before you started. I've been trying to incorporate the 10 minute rule into my life lately, and I've had pretty good results. Here are a few of my latest successes (plus a failure):

Successes:
 Cleaning out/organizing my email at work.
 Switching out my winter clothes to summer clothes (still have some organizing to do, but at least the mountain-sized pile is more like a hill).
 Reading the new time-management book that Tobin lent me (I've had it for a long time, and yes... I do see the irony in 'not having enough time' to learn how to be more efficient).

Failure:
Instead of listing a few failures, I'm going to go into a little detail on my nutritionally-motivated, badly-executed produce failure. So...this weekend I bought a lot of fruits and vegetables at the farmers market. Usually what happens is I buy them on Sunday with the intention to eat them all week, but if I don't wash/prep them before the work week starts, all of a sudden it's Friday and they're not quite as appealing. So I decided to try the 10 minute rule. 10 minutes into the washing/prepping process I had half a mangled watermelon, a gallon-sized bag full of cabbage shreds, and some clean cherries. But I also had 2 bags of untouched produce, a bunch of asparagus wilting in the colander, 3 hungry dogs, a 'hill' of clothes to put away, and I was getting hungry. Another hour and a half later everything was done, and I have some really good Asian-style coleslaw with me for lunch today, but I was also kind of resenting the 10 minute rule. I think where I went wrong was trying to do too much. There should be a '1 vegetable at a time' rule, where you're not allowed to start on a new vegetable until the previous one is nicely bagged and in the refrigerator. I guess if you learn from your failure, and it saves you even more time in the future, then it was a mistake worth making.

In any case, when used well, the 10 minute rule comes highly recommended by me. Has anyone used this, or have a time-management trick that they love?