Trying to get better at something is a hard journey. I’m sure we all tried to improve at something at some point in our life. It could range from trying to improve yourself physically through working out or getting better grades from studying. I’m sure we can all agree that starting or being consistent is hard but here is a solution that may work for you. 

20-Minute Habit

The 20-Minute Habit is as it sounds. Simply spending 20-minutes on whatever task you’re trying to work on. It can be working out for 20-minutes or studying for 20-minutes. It can be whatever you want to improve on. 

Why It Works

There are multiple reasons why it works. One is it’s not too hard to implement.The reason why is because it’s simply 20-minutes. 20-minutes may seem daunting but it is a lot better than doing a task for hours and burning yourself out.

Example

Picture this, you have two weeks to study for a final. Then if you spend 20-minutes each day for the two weeks before the final, you would have spent a total of 4 hours and 40 minutes studying. You can attempt to spend the same amount of time studying before the exam on the last day but there are many studies that show cramming doesn’t help. Not only that, if you spend 20-minutes studying each day you also will learn the material better than cramming. Another reason is it is easy to be consistent. 

Once you implement this habit you have to be consistent but since it doesn’t take a lot of time out of your day. It’s easy to do. It requires some discipline to do something you may not enjoy like studying but it’s only for 20-minutes. However if 20-minutes is maybe too much then you can always choose how long you want to study. 

You can adjust studying for 20-minutes to ten or five minutes. Now it may not seem efficient to study for 5 minutes but people have to start somewhere and doing something is better than nothing. Even if you quit doing the 20-minute habit for whatever reason, you can always pick it right back up because it requires so little effort. 

Self improvement through studying was an example used but you can also apply this to whatever you want to improve at.