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Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

> Everyone _has_ 10 minutes

But it takes more than 10 minutes to run 10 minutes. You might want to change clothes, get to a suitable place for running, run, get back, take a shower, change clothes again, get back up to speed with whatever you left in the middle of, etc…

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C'mon. I run in mostly the same crappy clothes every day - either I get out of bed, drink an espresso shot and go for a quick run then, or I take my lil one to her daycare and do my run on the way back. Do I shower afterwards? Yes, and I would even without running. If you feel that you don't have 10-15 min for that, you could always get up 10-15 min earlier, and voila, you just found the time! :)

EDIT: I agree that some folks may live in places where you just can't go for a run outside of your house. Different situation for sure.

It’s like those recipes that are supposed to take less than 15 minutes, but then the first step is to put finely chopped onions in a pan. That on its own normally takes at least 5-10 minutes to prepare for me.

Not sure if this is helpful or not - but it was intended to be so.

Finley chopping an onion shouldn’t take long. You just need a very sharp chefs knife and the right technique.

Cut the top off, then peel, then cut in half, then cut in fine slices, keeping the bottom intact to hold the onion together, then do one cut across the middle horizontally keeping the bottom intact. Then cut back towards the bottom making fine dice. The real trick is holding the base of the blade rather than just the handle to make the knife more rigid and your cut more precise and using the knuckle on your non dominant hand as a guide, after a while you should be able to cut sequentially without looking because your off hand should all be behind your knuckle of your index finger. Shouldn’t take more than a minute with sufficient practice.

Yes, with enough practice you can get an onion chopped in less than a minute, and for what it’s worth I do it more or less the way you describe.

But we have the same problem again: chopping an onion for one minute takes more than one minute. I probably need to spend a few minutes clearing some space, because my kitchen is small and tends to be in less than perfect order. Do I have a clean chopping board to use? No, then I need to clean one. Is my preferred knife for chopping onions clean? Same thing. What about the onions, what type of onion was I supposed to use, and how many? Better check the recipe again. Then I need to check the onions I have, pick which ones to use, do they look ok or did they start to spoil? And sometimes they’re just terribly hard to peel. Then after I’m done I need to collect all the little peels and other leftover bits and put them in the composter - which is getting full so I should probably change it.

Add this up, consider that I needed to chop more than one onion and that my technique is less than perfect, and it easily takes 5–10 minutes.

There's a great saying: “You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes everyday - unless you're too busy; then you should sit for an hour.” ;)

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