Recently I ran across a decision making strategy that could
help you decide which project to write (most of us have more ideas than we have
time).
It was invented by business writer Suzy Welch and it’s called 10/10/10. It can also be used to evaluate whether you are using your time in general for the right things—“right” being based on your values, not anybody else’s.
The idea is to think about how you will feel about the decision or about how you use your time, looking back 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now, and 10 years from now.
For example, let’s say you are attracted to watching a new TV series that everybody is talking about but you also would like to get some writing done. If you choose watching TV, in ten minutes you may feel it was the right decision, if the show is good. However, in ten months the odds are you will have forgotten about the show and may wish you’d spend those hours writing. And in ten years, it’s really likely you will have totally forgotten the show and will wish you could point to a body of work you created.
By the same token, are you spending a lot of time writing posts on Facebook or Tweeting? In ten minutes you may feel happy that you sent out a witty message. In ten months those 140 characters will be long gone, and certainly in ten years they will have disappeared totally.
If you Tweet three times a day @ 140 characters, that’s 153,300 characters per year. If your average word is 7 characters long, that’s just under 22, 000 words—about one-third of a novel. Of course if you spend just a bit of additional time you can easily produce 44,000 words or more in that year. So ten years on, you’d be looking back at 220,000 to 440,000 words!
The 10/10/10 method encourages us to distinguish between what is appealing in the moment and what is more meaningful in the long run. I’ve found it useful recently, give it a try.
(for more tips and strategies for making the most of your time, get a copy of my book, Focus: use the power of targeted thinking ot get more done. It's published by Pearson and you can get it from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)