The 15-Minute Block
A lot can be done with a small chunk of time.
Nick Epley is a psychologist from the University of Chicago. Several years ago, he conducted an interesting study where he asked commuters on trains and buses to make a prediction: How would they feel after having a spontaneous conversation with a stranger next to them? Most thought they'd feel worse. They believed that solitude made for a better commute.
So Epley and his team designed an experiment. Participants were divided into three groups. One group was instructed to connect with a nearby stranger, another to remain disconnected, and another to commute as normal. Participants reported a much more positive feeling from connecting with others, even when they expected the opposite to be true.
The conclusion? Many people suffer from a "mistaken preference for solitude" and "misunderstand the consequences of social interactions," leading them to be "not social enough for their own well-being."
There is much to explore on this topic, but I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction than you might expect—less about the benefit of interaction, more about the chunk of time itself.
In talking about this study, Nick Epley told The Atlantic that the exercise likely did not change anyone's life. All it did was "marginally improve the experience of one 15-minute block of time." But what is life other than a long string of 15-minute blocks, one after another, stretched over days, months, years?
And that's why this experiment changed Epley's own life more than any other. He said, "It's not that I'm never lonely. It's that my moment-to-moment experience of life is better, because I've learned to take the dead space of life and make friends in it."
How to Shrink Time
I am obsessed with this idea of the 15-minute block. Anything and everything becomes possible when you break it down into a manageable chunk, especially (you knew this was coming!) screen time habits.
As adults, we spend roughly 4 hours a day on our phones, 2.5 of which are devoted to social media platforms. We pick up our phones an average of 144 times per day. We may look at our screen time averages and think, "Oh, it's 1, 2, 3, maybe 4 hours a days; it's not that bad," but when you multiply that out over a year, this represents a month or more of lost time. Look at this math:
Now, imagine that we reclaim two 15-minute chunks a day from frivolous scrolling to do anything else; it doesn't need to be productive, just something more enjoyable or fulfilling. That's 30 minutes a day, which adds up to 3.5 hours a week, which is 14 hours a month, which is 168 hours a year, or a full week!
I don't know what you could do with that time—maybe squeeze in a quick workout or make headway on a good book or whip up some tasty food or call your mother—but the point is, it would barely make a dent in the overall daily screen time that most adults accrue, while making your day-to-day life feel considerably richer.
When I show that screen time slide in my talks, I say, "It's not that every minute needs to be useful, but the things we pay attention to make us who we are. Over time, they comprise our entire lives."
A Way to Start Doing
Another way to think of the 15-minute block is a gateway to productivity. Sometimes I look at a task and think, "I don't know where to start," but then I tell myself, "I'll just do it for 15 minutes, then switch to something else." Inevitably, as soon as I jump in, the path to completion becomes clearer, and time flies. Before I know it, I've spent far more than 15 minutes and I feel better about my ability to complete the task.
Here's another example. There are days when I don't think I have time to start preparing dinner between the end of my workday and when I need to leave for a class at the gym. But if there are 15 minutes to spare, I force myself to get started—and am always surprised by how much headway I can make. You can do a lot in 15 minutes—throw bean soup ingredients into the Instant Pot, put a lentil-rice casserole in the oven, toss some chicken in a marinade, whip up homemade pizza dough to rise. It makes life so much easier by the time I get home.
The same goes for exercise. There are days when I don't feel like working out or going for a walk, but I tell myself that just moving for 15 minutes is better than nothing. Nine times out of 10, it turns into a full-blown hike or workout, and I feel great afterward.
Kids' music practices are the same. It's daunting to find time to do a daily practice, but what if you say, "Just start with 15 minutes"? Maybe that's all they do (it's better than nothing), but maybe it extends naturally as they get into the flow of things and realize that a full practice is only two or three or four of those short-ish chunks. Not so bad!
When my own kids were little, I could tell when they needed to go outside and burn off excess energy. They would protest, but I'd say, "You have to go out for 15 minutes." Inevitably, as soon as they got outside, they'd get so caught up in playing that they would forget to come in after 15 minutes, sometimes staying out for an hour or more.
15 Minutes of Screen Time
The 15-minute block is a useful concept for parents who are concerned about their kids' screen time habits. If you don't feel ready to go cold-turkey—confiscating devices, deleting social media apps, or swapping out smartphones for basic phones—you can start by reducing screen time and device use to 15-minute chunks. You don't have to do everything all at once, but you can make great progress—and normalize the concept of phonelessness—by weaning them off it incrementally.
For instance, you could tell kids that they get their phone for 15 minutes when they get home from school or before starting homework or when they wake up in the morning during summer vacation, but then you'll take it away so they can do other things. That short chunk of time allows a sense of access and connectivity without taking over their lives.
Of course, Epley's original finding about talking to strangers applies to us, too. Don't underestimate the psychological boost you will get feel from interacting with people over the course of a day. If you get invited to do something and don't feel like it, just go! Tell yourself you will give it a few 15-minute blocks before leaving, and almost always you will feel better.
The full scale of a life stretched across decades is impossible to grasp. Broken down into 15-minute blocks, however, it fills with potential. The more living you can squeeze out of each block, and the more blocks you add up, the richer and more fulfilling your life will become. So, go out there, do things, and have fun!
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You are speaking my language! As a Recovering Perfectionist, I tend to put off projects that I cannot complete from beginning to end. This, of course, means that things pile up (mail, dishes, toys...) or get neglected altogether (cleaning, writing thank you notes, responding to emails...). Years ago, I heard someone say, "Just do 10 minutes or 10 things." It has become my mantra and my primary productivity hack, for all the reasons you so beautifully stated in this post.
This is such a great newsletter. I’ve been so much more social than ever lately, but I’m overusing my phone. 15 minute blocks of unscreened time sounds very doable.