The 20 minutes myth

The Smashing Magazine recently featured an article about the great idea to design something every day and doing so by means of 15 - 20 minutes daily chunks.

Basically, this sounds like a great idea. Some small action every day looks easy, manageable, and like something that could be done.

The problem is, though, that this contradicts the whole context switching costs as charmingly described by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister in Peopleware or as Paul Graham more recently did in his piece about maker's versus manager's schedule.

Of course, the underlying motivation of the smashing article still holds: practice creates experience. But don't be fooled about the real cost of real and repetitive work. It's most likely more than just a mere twenty minutes a day. But may very well be worth every every microsecond if you can keep up the pace and stick around long enough. Or to put it more simple: inspiration is sometimes just the by-product of hard work.