There is a very specific kind of desperation that hits in the school pickup line.

The car is idling. A podcast is half playing. Your brain is cycling through open loops: the email you forgot, the side project you miss, the laundry you definitely did not switch to the dryer.

You check the time. Nine minutes until the bell.

Nine minutes feels like nothing. Not enough to do “real” work, just enough to doom scroll and feel bad about it. For a long time, those little scraps of time were where my projects went to die. Too small to matter, too easy to waste.

Then I started treating those scraps like building blocks, and I gave an AI the extremely glamorous job of “making my nine minutes count.”

That is the whole idea of the 10 Minute Builder. Not hustle culture. Not “wake up at 4 a.m. and grind.” Just: use the tiny windows you already have, and let an AI assistant do enough of the heavy lifting that those windows actually move your project forward.

Real numbers first.

If you are a parent, one study says you get about half an hour of true “me time” a day, and even that is usually chopped into pieces. If you run a small business, surveys say you lose more than an hour a day to busywork and interruptions.

So most of us do not have three golden hours to “go deep” on a side project. We have:

Those pockets feel useless because of context switching. Every time you stop and restart a task, there is a mental “boot up” cost. It can take 20 minutes just to remember where you left off. If all you have is 10, you never even get past the loading screen.

This is where AI gets interesting, not as magic, but as a very patient continuity partner. It can remember the thread of your project when your brain is fried. It can turn “I only have 10 minutes” into “I can still do one real thing.”

Let’s make this concrete. Here is the kind of work that fits shockingly well into a 10 minute window when you have an AI assistant nearby.

1. Micro planning instead of vague guilt

2. Drafts you can fix later

3. Brainstorms on tap

4. Life admin that protects your project time

None of this requires code. None of it requires a perfect prompt. It is just using the AI as a fast first pass machine so your 10 minutes actually produce something you can build on.

The biggest enemy of the 10 Minute Builder is context loss.

If you only touch your project in tiny slices, your brain has to reload the whole situation every time. That is like opening a giant Figma file on a 5 year old laptop. The fan screams. Everything lags. You give up.

Here is the move that changed things for me: I stopped trying to remember everything myself. I made the AI my external brain.

Practically, that looks like:

Now, when I open that chat in the pickup line, I do not spend 10 minutes re reading my own notes. The AI gives me a little recap and a tiny task. Most days, that recap is the difference between doing something and sighing and letting the doom scroll start.

This is task chunking in the wild. You are not trying to “launch the business” in 10 minutes. You are trying to write one product blurb. Draft one FAQ. Outline one lesson. And you are letting the AI both slice the work and remember the slices for you.

Here is a simple loop you can steal and modify. Think of it as flossing for your project.

1. Pick one project

Not five. One. The course. The Etsy shop. The newsletter. The app. The thing you will be glad you nudged forward 1% today.

2. Start a dedicated AI thread for it

Title it with the project name. In the first message, brain dump where you are, what you want, and how much time you realistically have per day.

3. Ask for micro tasks

Something like: “Given this project and my time limits, list 10 tasks that take 10 minutes or less. Sort them from easiest to hardest.”

Star the ones that feel doable when you are half asleep. Those are your go to moves for chaotic days.

4. Run a 10 minute session

When a tiny window opens:

5. Leave breadcrumbs

Before you close, tell the AI, “Summarize what we just did in 3 bullets and propose the next 3 micro tasks.” That becomes tomorrow you’s on ramp.

If you manage this loop three or four times a week, you are not just “using AI.” You are building a rhythm. You are teaching your brain that your project is not dead. It is happening, slowly, in the seams of your day.

A few real talk objections I hear in my own head:

“The AI’s writing is mid.”

Correct. Raw AI output is often bland. That is fine. Let it be your 80 percent draft machine. Use your precious human minutes to tweak tone, add stories, double check facts. Editing something boring is faster than birthing something from a blank page.

“I do not have time to learn prompts.”

Then do not. Start stupid simple. Think: “Talk to it like a slightly confused intern.”

Fancy prompt engineering can come later, or never. You can get plenty of value from basic sentences.

“It will not sound like me.”

Not if you never touch it, yeah. Two fixes:

Your voice is the seasoning. The AI cooks the plain rice.

“Is it safe to paste my whole client doc in here?”

Maybe not. Use placeholders where it feels sketchy. “Client A,” “$X revenue,” “[sensitive details removed].” You can still get useful drafts without feeding it real names, numbers, or secrets. For truly sensitive stuff, skip AI or use tools from providers you trust with better privacy guarantees.

If this all feels abstract, here is a concrete challenge.

Next week, pick one project and one AI tool you already have access to. No new subscriptions. No fancy setup.

Your only rule: five days, 10 minutes per day with that AI, always in service of that one project.

Day by day, it might look like:

Track how many minutes you actually spend. Track what exists at the end of the week that did not exist on Monday. A draft page? A clearer offer? A list of ideas you can grab on tired nights?

It will not feel dramatic, but that is kind of the point. No montage. No glow up. Just a quiet, stubborn refusal to let your project flatline.

Some nights, my 10 minutes feel like lighting a tiny candle in a messy, loud house. Kids arguing, dishes in the sink, Slack still pinging. But that candle is mine.

The AI is not the hero of that story. It is just the lighter that makes it easier to get the flame going before someone needs a snack.

If you have been waiting for a three hour block to magically appear, consider this your permission slip: stop waiting. Grab your next 10 minute window. Open your AI of choice. Ask it to help you move one inch forward.

You do not have to build the whole thing today.

You just have to keep it alive.