Most Things Take 5 Minutes

Someone once told me, "Most things take 5 minutes." What a gem of wisdom that has turned out to be. It may not always be true in a literal sense, but the concept certainly is. For inveterate procrastinators, 5 minutes is often all it takes to become unstuck on something that's been put off so many times that the mere thought of the thing becomes more daunting than the original task would have been.

If I'm avoiding something, I can decide to do just a tiny bit of it. Sometimes, it can get done in 5 minutes, whether it's making a dreaded phone call, or paying bills, or cleaning a messy desk. If the task is a bigger one, the 5-minute trick is sometimes all it takes to get rolling, if done enough times. Just 5 minutes is the difference between being sedentary and being not-sedentary, for instance. And, it can get me on my way toward a good, steady habit of being more physically active.

There's another good thing about the 5-minute trick. Endless to-do lists and lofty goals are usually self-defeating for me, because they can add up to a long string of failures that only serves to taunt and harass me. Building a mountain of little successes sure feels a whole lot better. As the old saying goes, "From small beginnings come great things."

See Dirt, Clean Dirt

I once knew a person who had a remarkably clean house, and at the time, I was going through a depression and had been struggling with the condition of mine. Her husband was a house builder, and they had a fairly large house. They had two small kids, and she had a busy life. I asked her, what was her approach? Did she do the housework on a schedule? Did she hire someone to clean? She told me no, she used a "see dirt, clean dirt" approach. I've adopted that approach ever since.

Let's translate this to work styles in general. Some people do well with long to-do lists and are very productive when they have everything planned out on a schedule. I am not one of those people, however. I have much more of what I've now come to call an "ad hoc" work style. I used to get frozen in place by daunting mountains of work tasks ahead of me. Nowadays, I combine "see task, do task" together with another thing I once also learned from a friend, which is "most things take five minutes," and I'm amazed at how much can get done.