The 15-Minute Buffer Rule

Question

Here’s a simple rule that protects projects from stalling:

Spend at least 15 minutes daily keeping the project map in your head.

• Not pushing hard.
• Not finishing tasks.
• Not making visible progress.

Just enough to keep continuity alive.

This is a buffer, not a productivity hack.

In those 15 minutes you might:

• read the last thing you wrote,
• open the project and add a single comment,
• sketch a solution you won’t implement yet,
• rename a variable,
• write a TODO that clarifies the next step.

Sometimes you’ll do “nothing important”.

And that’s fine. Because the real output is not the task - it’s that tomorrow you can continue without friction.