Why Eleven Minutes to Mars?

Like many people, I was captivated by the landing of the Mars Perseverance Rover on February 18, 2021.

While watching the live stream I discovered that (based on the position of the planets at that time) it took eleven minutes for a radio signal to travel from Mars to Earth. This seemed so unreal, so impossibly possible.

Quite honestly I wanted to open my window and shout:

“CAN YOU BELIEVE IT TAKES ONLY ELEVEN MINUTES TO SEND A MESSAGE BETWEEN EARTH AND MARS. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?!”

It also got me thinking… what else might it be possible to accomplish in that amount of time?

I decided to bring a group of people together each day — for 11 days — to reimagine a little increment of time. And thus was born a grand experiment that invites people to reimagine their relationship with time and attention in 11-minute increments and in doing so, transform their experience of time.

Doing so helped me realize that managing time is not nearly as powerful (or productive or rewarding) as REIMAGINING it.

Because all of the productivity tools, habits, and practices to manage time don’t matter if you don’t have a good understanding of your experience of — and your relationship with — time.

In other words, It doesn’t matter if you’re productive if you don't give a f*ck about what you are producing.

To make time matter requires two things: attention and intention.

I created the M.A.R.S. Framework to bring those two elements into the way we experience time.

It’s a beautifully simple repliciable framework that leverages the power of collective action to make time matter, specifically within the container of 11 minutes.

Whether you have tiny tasks, tremendous ideas, un-played musical instruments, mountains of manuscripts, piles of papers that need to be tamed, poems stuck in your pen, or you just want to spend eleven minutes looking at the sky, there is so much that is possible in 11 minutes.