Change Your Life in "Just Ten Minutes!"

Hello and welcome to a hunterly Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is November 14th.

Lately, the social media algorithms have been enticing me with videos about viral recipes (Hype or hack? Gas or trash?), good 90-second exercise routines (lymph node drainage, better balance, improved posture), and organizational tips. (See what you can accomplish in only 10 or 20 minutes a day!) While the viral recipes produced some interesting results - a "chocolate mousse" made from an avocado, a banana, and some cocoa powder - I saved many of the exercise routines (as well as some home decor ones my kids insisted were AI-generated. (Mom, how could she do all that in one weekend?) It was the time-lapse videos of 10-minute increments over the course of a year of organizational home transformations from trash to smash (as in smashingly organized) - from "This" (ugh) to Bliss (ah!) -  that made me feel a little jealous and super motivated.

I once wrote a speech (which became a chapter in the Keystones & Cornerstones anthology published by the Keystone Speakers Toastmasters club) called "My 10-minute Life." In it, I postulated that while I may not have one sixty-minute unit of time in a day to do a task, I was pretty sure I did have six ten-minute units in a day. Inspired and reminded by the videos that small acts over time yield big changes, I decided to tackle this past week with a litany of 10-minute tasks.

What could I accomplish in ten minutes?

• A dinner plan for the entire week
• A daily physical therapy session to improve the range and flexibility of my arms and shoulders. (I even have an app for that.)
• Sweeping the floor
• Another row on the Irish sweater I'm knitting for my son (Intended for Christmas 2026, now intended for Christmas 2027)
• Reading (Bonus: ten-minute cycles through my 3 reads: Fiction, Non-fiction, and a memoir)
• Loading the dishwasher
• Cleaning out the drawer in my antique hutch
• Journaling
• Sorting and setting out the winter hats that sat in the laundry room all summer
• Throwing in a load of laundry
• Listening to a portion of a podcast
• (Finally) putting the mail on the kitchen counter in the a) recycling or b) filing cabinet
• Stretching
• Hanging up one piece of art on the wall. (I have many.)

The potential for so much accomplishment warmed my heart. I was excited to test the 10-minute hypothesis and report back to you, dear readers.

Here's how I did:

• On Sunday, I made a mental plan to cook dinner the first 3 days of the week. Monday evening, I cooked Monday night's dinner and the proteins for the next two meals. It took way longer than 10 minutes. I haven't cooked since Wednesday.
• I used my physical therapy app for one 10-minute session - on Friday.
• I just swept the floor before working on this blog. It only took 10 minutes!
• At 7am this morning, I told myself, "Knit for 10 minutes!" The sweater is still sitting in my bag, untouched, as it was the entire week.
• I read my novel every night, but I only made it 2 minutes before falling asleep. Meanwhile, the other two books collected another layer of dust.
• An impromptu "War of the Dishwasher" ensued between my husband and son, where the clean dishes sat washed and clean inside the dishwasher all week until my exasperated son finally gave in and unloaded them despite his stance that he wouldn't be unloading the dishwasher because he "didn't want to mess with Dad's system." I watched from the sidelines, using those ten minutes in other ways.
• I opened the drawer of my hutch on Tuesday and contemplated the disarray before closing it to go to my Toastmasters meeting.
• No journaling.
• The winter hats mock me. The sneer and jeer on this Saturday: "Will today be the day?"
• I threw a half load of reds into the washer on Monday, only to be removed by my son who needed to do his own laundry on Friday.
• I paired podcasts with tasks and exercise every day this week. Win! (However, these activities stretched way out of the 10-minute time limit, disqualifying them as reliable data for the 10-minute experiment)
• The mail heap got bigger.
• Incorporating some micro-minutes of stretching was the biggest win of the week. My shoulder and hip thank me.
• The wall art is still on the floor.

This morning, I've already done my ten minutes of stretches, ten minutes of YouTube videos of interest - knitting, comedy, behavioral psychoanalyses, the new Hunger Games movie trailer (okay, that was way more than ten minutes), and two cups of coffee. I googled how to write a ten-minute blog post. It still took me an hour.

While I may have fallen short on the bulk of my ambitious plan, I will say that the few wins I had felt rewarding and buoyed me through the failures. And I use the word "failures" very loosely. Instead, they will be the sticks of fuel for next week. It's good to have a plan.