A friend from the FLOSS community has been re-evaluating his priorities as he’s going through some life changes.

One change is that he’s chellenging himself to spend 10 minutes a day on meaningful work. Importantly, it’s work that’s meaningful to him.

That got me to also try a 10 minute challenge. I made it every day for the first week, then missed a day. I’m working on getting back in the groove again.

Craig’s post is what inspired me to take up the challenge. The priority was still to support him as he started his project, so I laid low. He’s been making progress on his project, which is fantastic. It’s great to see updates on what he’s doing, the achievements, the challenges, the satisfaction of keeping on.

His progress is helping keep me motivated to work on my project. Getting results has also been great for me. It’s also great for my family. I’ll get to that in a moment.

I am going about the challenge somewhat differently than Craig. That’s OK, as we believe in the importance of forks in the FLOSS community :). We also believe in configuring to fit the needs of the person using it.

First, because I’m geeky in a more dorky way, I’m doing 12:21 a day ( 21:12 is already in use for another project ) rather than 10 minutes a day :). We’re both huge Rush fans, so that seemed like the best place to start :). I’m not going through the same life challenges, so some days I cheat and get in a couple sessions.

Since I’m not as focussed I’m actually working on 3 projects. I choose the project depending on how the whim of the day fits me. Two are private writing exercises ( private journal for family ( that which was foreshadowed a few lines ago ) and another private project ).

The final exercise is to create blog posts, which brings us here. I don’t expect to complete the blog posts in 12 minutes, rather the goal is to keep making progress. As an example, I started this post yesterday and just made a few changes to this paragraph, then added this very sentence you are currently reading. It’s like time-travel, except it’s not.

The blog is in AsciiDoc and gets checked into git. That keeps it easy enough to write a little here and a little there.

I also cheat and go over 12:21, but I’m trying to change my workflow to have that as a limitation. Both sessions for this post went over by a couple minutes, so I’m not yet there. My hope is the limitation will encourage me to be more efficient in my efforts.

As continued evidence of my geekdom, here’s how I’m tracking my time:

counting to 12:21
$ ( for i in {01..12}; do sleep 60; echo -n "$i "; done ); sleep 12; echo -e "\n12:21"
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
12:21