TEN minutes can often be enough: I was lucky enough this week to be able to meet up with a friend whom I hadn’t seen for 10years.

Our meeting was only a brief tea and cake in Daisy’s café between her trains from Cornwall to London, but we crammed in as much as we could to the time that we had.

Jane and I used to work together in France and whilst we have remained friends since then, our lives have taken us in completely different directions.

Whilst I have ended up working in Devon via jobs in Finland and Spain, Jane was based for some time in Cambodia and is currently working in Kazakhstan as an English teacher – she has one of the most international and interesting CVs I know.

During our hour together we talked about how our lives had changed since we last met.

Jane has been through all sorts of challenges herself – and she said that one of the most important life lessons she had learnt in the last 10 years was the difference that doing something for just 10 or 15 minutes can make.

She said that at times when life had felt overwhelming, it had sometimes felt just too much to try and tackle the cleaning of a large house entirely on her own. Then she had read somewhere that just ten minutes of cleaning could actually make a difference.

She had adopted this as a mantra and found that anything was possible for that short period of time. Whilst it wasn’t long enough to clean the whole house, it was still enough to make a visible difference and also give her a boost mentally as well.

She was left with the feeling of having done something positive rather than continue avoiding what had felt too difficult to start.

She had applied the same lesson to going out for a walk. We all know about the positive effects of nature and the importance of getting fresh air, especially if your work keeps you inside for most of the day. However, getting dressed for a long hike in variable elements can also easily feel like one more chore to be completed when you are tired and dispirited.

An alternative is to forget the idea of a hike but to embrace the thought of 10 minutes outside – even if this is walking round your own garden.

From both listening to the stories of clients and also my own life, I know how easy it is to put things off simply because the idea of starting them feels so tiring and overwhelming. It can often feel like a much easier option to do nothing at all.

But if you change this mindset and adopt instead the ‘ten minute rule’ the task immediately feels more achievable, so you are far less likely to avoid starting it. What often follows is that you realise that the task isn’t nearly as unpleasant as it might have felt beforehand so it’s much easier to carry on and do it for longer. But the point is that you have only committed to 10 minutes, so just doing this will feel like an achievement in itself.

I used this advice from Jane this weekend between two consecutive nightshifts. I was too tired to think about going on a long walk anywhere, but I decided that ten minutes walking in the forest would definitely be a good thing to do.

Predictably, that 10 minutes turned into 50 and I went to my next shift feeling less tired and more rejuvenated that had I done nothing at all.

If there is something that you know would be a positive thing to do but you have been putting it off for some time, think about Jane’s 10-minute rule. Decide to do the activity for just that amount of time and see if it becomes easier to tackle as a result. In all probability it won’t feel nearly as hard as you had feared and you might even end up enjoying it and doing it for longer. You will also find out that in this world of constantly being pulled in different directions, just 10 minutes can sometimes be enough.