The sum of small parts

I have an attention span of maybe 20 minutes. For as long as I’ve indisputably been an adult I haven’t gotten really good at doing something, and I usually blame this 20 minute attention span. The few things I’ve got good at doing are things I can do for hours, but such things are few and can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I’ve known for years now that there’s another handful of things that want to get good at but I’ve made depressingly little progress since I’ve started working. Work is another great thing to blame my lack of accomplishment on.

I’m not going to try and use this twenty minute span rather than fight it for a while. I figure, if I do 20-30 minutes of 3 things I want to get better at everyday, that’ll only take an hour to an hour and a half. These twenty minutes should add up to something in the long run, and this time will mostly come out of time that I sit wondering, “what do I do today” after getting done with work. There’s even studies that show that doing half an hour of something everyday is better than doing three hours of it once a week because of neural pathways that get reinforced and neurons that fire in your sleep and other-such-convincing-biological-stuff.

I practiced scales on the guitar for half an hour yesterday and fifteen minutes today. But even those fifteen minutes felt pretty good. I also spent around twenty minutes writing this blog post today so that’s something. You should keep your fingers crossed and hope this isn’t just another blog post about a plan to do these things that I always wanted to do that gets forgotten about in a week.

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