Minute Maximization for Creative Work
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Dicks is, in his words, obsessive about minutes — and his production method is to do creative work in whatever fragments the day offers rather than waiting for ideal conditions. The aspiring writer who arrived seven minutes late to their McDonald's meeting had written nothing, believing she needed a quiet two-hour block from ten to twelve; Dicks used her seven late minutes to write sentences. The method has three moving parts: strip the ritual requirements, treat every pocket of time as usable by matching a task to its size, and abandon the assumption that work must proceed linearly — write chapter fifteen if that's what today allows. The arithmetic does the rest: a book is roughly five thousand sentences, and seven sentences taken twenty-three times a day gets you there.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Strip out the ideal-conditions requirement
Identify the environmental conditions you believe you need — the coffee shop, the smooth jazz, the right mug, the two-hour window — and treat them as fiction. Dicks deliberately meets writers in a noisy McDonald's on a plastic table with a Diet Coke to tear that belief away.
Pro tip Soldiers in World War One trenches scribbled in journals under artillery fire. Your conditions are not the constraint.
- 2
Inventory your pocket minutes
Find the recurring fragments the day already contains: arriving five minutes early, waiting for someone who's late, the irrelevant stretches of a meeting, waiting on test results, time you'd otherwise spend scrolling.
Pro tip Dicks takes about 23 such moments a day.
- 3
Define what actually fits in ten minutes
Set realistic unit outputs. Ten minutes doesn't produce a chapter, but it does produce five good new sentences, or a re-read and clean-up of the last three paragraphs you wrote earlier that day.
Watch out If the unit is too big, you'll skip the block; make it something you can genuinely finish.
- 4
Work non-linearly — touch any stepping stone
Stop treating the project as A to B to C. Dicks told a memoirist who didn't know where to start to write chapter fifteen and save chapter one for the day she could write chapter one. Every stone has to be touched eventually, so touch whichever one today's motivation and time allow.
Pro tip Keep a list of pending tasks by size so you can pick one that fits the gap in front of you.
- 5
Match task size to block size
Don't hold a two-hour task hostage waiting for a two-hour window while ten- and fifteen-minute tasks sit undone. Note too that many apparently six-hour projects decompose into ten-minute increments and never needed to be done in one sitting.
Watch out Waiting for the perfect-sized block is how weeks pass with nothing shipped.
- 6
Capture on whatever is to hand
Remove the tool dependency. Dicks wrote most of a novel on Post-it notes during faculty meetings and transferred them to the computer later; Abdaal drafted video scripts in Notion on a hospital computer between patients.
Pro tip Phone notes, a Post-it and a borrowed keyboard all count as your writing setup.
- 7
Do the arithmetic and trust it
Reframe the project as a countable unit total — a book is about five thousand sentences. Seven sentences now puts you meaningfully closer than you were a minute ago. Quality still depends on your effort, skill and experience, but volume is purely a function of accumulated fragments.
Watch out The arithmetic guarantees a finished draft, not a good one.
In the wild
Dicks gives fledgling writers thirty minutes if they meet him wherever he happens to be — that day, a McDonald's. The writer arrived seven minutes late and described her book, which sounded interesting. He waited for his moment and asked how much she'd written. Nothing yet. So he turned his laptop around and showed her the sentences he had written during the seven minutes she was late. She believed she could only write in a two-hour block between ten and twelve, in the right place and the right frame of mind.
→ A concrete demonstration that the conditions she thought she needed were optional, delivered as evidence rather than advice.
Dicks wrote almost all of his fifth novel during school faculty meetings. The book is narrated by an obsessive list-maker, so the story is told through list after list — and lists are exactly what fits in the moments when something irrelevant is being discussed, or during the five minutes he always arrives early, or while the end-of-meeting raffle is drawn. He didn't even need a computer; a Post-it note held a list, and the lists were transferred to the computer later.
→ An entire published novel produced entirely inside dead time in mandatory meetings.
While working as a doctor and building a YouTube channel on the side, Abdaal used the same fragments: instead of scrolling Twitter on the toilet he typed video notes in Notion, and while waiting eight minutes for a patient's blood results with an empty waiting room he opened Notion on the ward computer and drafted bullet points. He notes he applied this rigorously to YouTube but had talked himself out of it for his book, where he insisted on four hours and the right coffee.
→ A channel built alongside full-time medicine — and a live illustration that the belief is task-specific, not real.
Common mistakes
Waiting for the two-hour block
Holding out for a large clean window means the ten- and fifteen-minute tasks never get done either, and most large tasks turn out to decompose into small increments anyway. The block rarely arrives, and the project doesn't move while you wait.
Requiring a ritual to start
Coffee, music, location and mood become preconditions that quietly function as permission to not work. Dicks's counterexample is trench writers under artillery fire, and Van Gogh producing great work under conditions nobody would call ideal.
Being in love with having written
Dicks observed that the McDonald's writer wasn't invested in writing but in the idea of having written — the fantasy of quitting the job, writing ten to twelve, then lunching with friends. That fantasy is incompatible with using the seven minutes you actually have.
From the transcript
“I used the seven minutes that you were late to write some sentences”
“10 minutes is precious to you it doesn't mean in 10 minutes I can write a chapter”
“a book is probably about five thousand sentences”
From the episode
Someday Is Today: Achieve Your Goals And Live Without Regret - Matthew Dicks
Matthew Dicks