How 5 minutes a day can revitalize your writing

Clients are sometimes surprised when I suggest that they write for only five minutes a day.

“That sounds crazy, embarrassing,” they tell me. “What possible benefit could I get from that?”

Writing for five minutes is not only a perfectly reasonable goal, it’s the most sensible one possible, if you’re dealing with writer’s block or even writer’s resistance.

I usually hear two big complaints about writing. Here is how the short-bursts-of-writing strategy solves both of them:

Complaint A: I don’t have time to write.

1. Five minutes is such a ridiculously small amount of time that you can’t possibly not do it. So you wake up five minutes early and squeeze in your writing before breakfast—or you do it five minutes before going to bed at night.

Even when my triplets were 3 years old—the height of craziness in a toddler-run household—I could have managed it. Even the president of the United States could write for five minutes a day. Even you could write for five minutes a day, no matter how jam-packed your schedule.