The ten-minute rule for shipping anything
A small, very stubborn rule we use internally to keep products from sprawling.
We have one rule that has saved more products than any framework: if a section takes more than ten minutes to use, it has to justify the eleventh minute.
That's it. It sounds small. It is small. It changes everything.
Where it came from
Early on, our drafts kept ballooning. A 30-page guide would become 60, then 90. The writer was proud. The reader was lost.
The fix wasn't more editing. It was a stopwatch.
For every chapter, we ran the actual task it asked the reader to do. If the task took eight minutes, we kept the chapter. If it took twenty-five, the chapter had to defend itself: was the extra time delivering proportional value? Almost always, no. Almost always, we cut.
What you cut
The first things to go are usually:
- The history of the technique you're teaching.
- The case study that's longer than the lesson.
- The "before we begin" warmup.
- The recap of what's coming.
- The recap of what just happened.
None of those are bad writing. They're just expensive.
What survives
What survives is the thing the reader actually came for. Most products are 70% padding around a 30% core. The ten-minute rule pushes the ratio toward 40/60, then 30/70.
Then the product fits in someone's actual life. And they keep using it.