The Five Minute Rule
Five minutes doesn’t seem like a lot of time to get anything accomplished, but it can be if you allow it to turn into ten, thirty, or an hour of time.
Today I was tired after work, but I had to check my email and write back an old friend that I’ve been putting off for the past couple of days. I was finally at home and the last thing I wanted to do was get back on the computer. I felt the same way yesterday, which is why I didn’t do it last night, but I decided to try the “Five Minute Rule.†I told myself that I would take just five minutes to start the email. If after five minutes I didn’t want to continue I’d save the message and do something else.
I sat down and figured out how I wanted to respond and began typing. Letting myself figure out a plan got my brain moving and I put me into the flow of writing. Fifteen minutes later I was done and moved onto the next email that I was putting off. Those five minutes turned into an hour of accomplishing a few “To do’sâ€.
Five minutes can seem like a lot of time when you are holding your breath. Or remember when you were a kid and there was five more minutes left in the school day? Five minutes can be the start of a whole new project that changes your life or at least makes you happy. This blog was started under the “Five Minute Rule†and now over a half year later it lives on.
The “Five Minute Rule†works best for people who hate to work out. The hardest part of working out is getting started. So before you can think about not working out, just get down on the floor and do push-ups and sit-ups for five minutes. When I’ve applied this rule to working out I usually end up extending my work out to fifteen or twenty minutes.
Go ahead and take those five minutes to do an item on your to do list and you’ll thank yourself for taking the first step, which probably will lead to accomplishing more than you thought you would.
